A Study on How Pictographic Script Promotes Young Children's Memory for Chinese Character Form under Explicit Learning
This 2014 educational-psychology study by Xu Shanshan and colleagues tests whether Naxi Dongba script or oracle-bone script better helps 4-5-year-old children remember the form of Chinese characters under explicit (deliberate) learning. In two experiments with 100 kindergartners, children learned Chinese characters paired with either Dongba or oracle-bone pictographs, then were tested immediately and three days later using a recognition task (Experiment 1, explicit memory) and a preference-judgment task (Experiment 2, implicit memory). Both scripts produced statistically equivalent facilitation overall, though oracle-bone pairing worked better for nouns and Dongba pairing better for verbs; nouns were remembered better than verbs, and immediate recall exceeded delayed recall. The authors conclude both pictographic scripts are effective literacy aids, working through a symbol-to-image-to-mental-language-to-speech processing pathway, and that oracle-bone script showed an advantage in a companion implicit-learning study.
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