主题：【原创】浅谈汉字与拼音文字的比较 （上） -- 人间树

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

The current research project with a survey design and refined instruments has come to the conclusion that reading Chinese is faster than reading English. An important implication of the findings lies in teaching Chinese as a foreign language. When students and instructors are convinced that being able to read Chinese characters is more profitable than previously believed, there should be more motivation and enthusiasm in teaching and learning the most difficult part of the language.

Another important implication of the finding is in the Chinese language reform. The ultimate goal of the radical reformers of the Chinese language is to romanize the Chinese written system. Obviously, the findings of the current research suggest that a transfer of written Chinese from logographs to phonetic graphs may not necessarily benefit its readers in terms of reading speed and comprehension rate.

The Chinese characters are notoriously known as hard to learn, hard to remember, and hard to write, and, additionally, numerous in amount of words to know for being literate (Taylor & Taylor, 1995, p.117). A Chinese child usually spends about two more years than an English-speaking child to learn to read and write to the degree of basic functioning. Language reform has been vehemently called for since beginning of the century, especially after the May 4th Movement in 1991. Chinese intellectuals such as Chen Duxiu and Hu Shi all advocated the Chinese language reform by abolishing the Chinese characters (Yan, 1996). They attributed the failure in science and technology early this century in China compared to western civilization to the difficulty in the written language. They further argued that if the characters were replaced by some form of alphabets, Chinese students would be able to spend more time on science and technology learning (He, 1996). This idea was later supported by the communists after 1949, when Mao Zedong claimed Chinese should "take the romanization road."

Because of historical reasons, the romanization of the Chinese language has never been realized in China. However, the delay of the Chinese romanization is not necessarily regret. Koreans and Japanese who alphabetized their written forms earlier have now shown some signs of Chinese characters coming back. Obviously, the Chinese characters are considered by more and more people to be indispensable in Korean and Japanese (Taylor & Taylor, 1995). Experiences in language reforms in Korea and Japan may have implied something for the Chinese language reformers.

The original motivation for alphabetizing or romanizing Chinese characters was from the facts that the Chinese characters are hard to learn, hard to remember, and hard to write. However, with the newly developed computer technology in Chinese word processing, those difficulties have been becoming less and less a concern for Chinese writers. With any of the currently available Chinese processing software, such as Nan Ji Star, Xin Tian Ma, Twin Bridge, Xia Li Ba Ren, entering Chinese words and editing Chinese files are much faster than handwriting on paper, even faster than English word processing on computer. A recent study conducted by Japanese researchers found that entering Kana (Chinese characters) in computer is about 10 times faster than entering Romaji (Romanized form) for the same words (Xu, 1992). In a Chinese processing procedure, the writer does not have to enter each letter or syllable to get the word. But in English or other alphabetic languages, every single letter must be entered one after another. A function which is called lianxiang (related thinking) is always in action to help a writer to produce a phrase or even a sentence by pressing one or a limited number of keys. An informal observation of skilled typists of Chinese in China and the authors' personal experience in typing Chinese and English also indicate that with further refinement of the software and up-grading the hardware, there is still more room to improve the already fast typing speed in Chinese.

The computer revolution has been exercising a great impact on the Chinese written language reform. The degree of impact by the computer is only limited by our imagination. Ten years ago, when some Chinese word processing software was first on market, some Chinese intellectuals felt what computer would mean for Chinese written language reform. As Taylor and Taylor (1995) observed at a national conference on language and scripts was convened in Beijing in 1986, "in some ways the greatest achievement of the conference was that it passed over in silence the issues of alphabetization and the elimination of Chinese characters."

In sum, the major concerns of the Chinese written language reform advocates are being removed by our increasingly large amount of computer knowledge. Additionally, we hope findings in this current research project can help make the issue clearer.

Besides other explanations, the finding is generally accounted for by the difference in scripts between the two languages. The logographic or ideographic nature of the Chinese writing system may provide advantages to some extent for the Chinese readers: they may not have to decode the word phonologically to know its meaning. If this is true, one step in reading process is saved for Chinese readers: they do not always have to decode a Chinese character into pronunciation before they understand the meaning of the character. In Chinese, there is a compliment phrase for fast readers, "yi mu shi hang," meaning to read "ten lines with one glimpse." It is more possible to read ten lines with one glimpse for a Chinese reader than for an English reader because of the difference in language processing procedure between logographs and alphabets. However, this hypothesis has to be put to the test in future research. Research in clinical linguistics and psycholinguistics with sophisticated experimental design and facilities is needed to investigate the difference in reading procedure between Chinese and English.

The current research used college freshmen as subjects to estimate the reading speed and comprehension difference between English and Chinese. Although we have tried all what we could to make the samples as comparable as possible, there could still be some differentiation in intelligence or verbal ability between the students at Capital Normal University (CNU) in Beijing, China and the students at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah. Given the percentage of the Chinese youth who have a chance to attend college compared to that of American young people, we might be able to match the CNU freshmen with the BYU freshmen in terms of intelligence or aptitudes in some aspects. Provided the limited funding for this thesis research, this may be the best we can do. Future research with better funding is suggested to study other populations who are more easily compared, such as professors from two similar universities, working class people who can read and write, Ph.D. candidates who are studying in the same program, etc.

ADDED MATERIAL

Xuehong Lü

SUNY University at Buffalo

Jie Zhang

SUNY College at Buffalo

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors want to thank Dr. Shenghua Jin, Professor of Psychology at Beijing Normal University for his assistance in data collection. Please direct all correspondence to Xuehong Lü, M.A., Chinese Language and Culture Program, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, State University of New York at Buffalo, 910 Clemens Hall, Buffalo, New York 14260.

Table 1 Demographic characteristics of the subjects under study

Chinese English Total

Sample Sample

(N = 126) (N = 111) (N = 237)

Gender

Male 52 52 104

Female 74 59 133

Age

16-17 5 4 9

18-20 107 101 208

21-22 14 4 18

23 and more 0 2 2

Area of Study

science 24 13 37

technology 15 7 22

soc science 87 40 127

humanities 0 15 15

undecided 0 36 36

Edu. Level Freshmen Freshmen

Table 2 Results of reliability tests of the instruments

For All For Odd For Selected

Items (16) Items (8) Items (5)(FN*)

Total Eng. Chi. Total Eng. Chi. Total Eng. Chi.

Mean(FN**) .774 .712 .828 .733 .683 .777 .870 .855 .882

Minimum .577 .469 .564 .577 .565 .564 .826 .813 .837

Maximum .906 .898 .935 .838 .832 .843 .906 .898 .934

Variance .011 .012 .010 .009 .013 .010 .001 .001 .002

Alpha .795 .739 .773 .676 .664 .635 .450 .483 .399

FOOTNOTES

* The five randomly selected items are No. 2, No. 5, No. 8, No. 11, and No. 14.

** Since the answer to question was coded as 1 or 0, with 1 as correct and 0 as wrong, and the mean score for each passage is calculated by the number of correct answers divided by the number of questions in the passage, the maximum mean score for each passage is a 1.

Table 3 Results of the multiple regression models predicting reading speed and comprehension

Model with Speed as the Dependent Variable

Variable B SE B Beta T Sig T

COMPRHESION .072623 .049936 .103226 1.454 .1472

ORTHOGRAPHY -2.318955 .708219 -.232407 -3.274 .0012

(Constant) 23.393444 2.243646 10.427 .0000

F = 5.36128 Signif F = .0053

Model with Comprehension as the Dependent Variable

Variable B SE B Beta T Sig T

SPEED .123347 .084814 .086779 1.454 1.472

ORTHOGRAPHY 6.394913 .846269 .450897 7.557 .0000

(Constant) 40.675691 2.334862 17.421 .0000

F = 28.55178 Signif F = .0000