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Cognitive Processes Involved in the Recognition of Chinese Characters

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Yuxin Jia
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Extract

Long ago the Chinese people developed the habit of thinking in terms of images. They also formed the habit of writing and recognizing scriptforms in terms of images. In fact, these diverse cognitive processes - thinking, writing and decoding in terms of images - have been interacting and reinforcing one another for thousands of years, and, as a result, have played a significant role in shaping Chinese culture and the Chinese mind, and have become a part of the collective unconscious of the people.

Although today the Chinese characters are highly abstract and symbolic, the language still preserves its pictographic and ideographic prototypes, the parent script which evolved almost six thousand years ago. In other words, although modern Chinese characters are no longer actual drawings of objects, ideas, and images, they still have a blood relationship to these primitive forms. Their graphemes, configurations, or grapho-semantic radicals still bear direct semantic relation to their referents, so much so that it would be fair to describe the development of Chinese writing as an overlapping process as well as a gradual one.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 40 , Issue 157 , March 1992 , pp. 67 - 87
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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