Professor of Chinese Hong Gang Jin wrote an article that was published in the peer reviewed Journal of Chinese Language Teachers Association, October, 2006, Vol. 41;3 PP35-56. The article, titled "Multimedia Effects and Chinese Character Processing: An Empirical Study of CFL Learners from Three Different Orthographic Backgrounds," concerns a study that examined the effects of multimedia presentation on Chinese character recognition.
From the abstract: The present study reports the findings concerning the effects of multimedia presentation, orthography, and processing experience on Chinese character recognition. One hundred twenty university students who were CFL learners from mainly three orthographic backgrounds participated in the study. The subjects' first languages include European languages such as English and German, East Asian Languages such as Japanese and Korean, and South Asian languages such as Thai, Indonesian, and Vietnamese. All subjects performed a recall task immediately after viewing 36 Chinese characters displayed either on a computer or a printout with various types of presentations, focusing on word formation rules (radicals), character stroke sequences, and pronunciation (Pinyin). The results indicate that participants who worked with the radical presentation performed best, and the performance of those who worked with the stroke presentation was in turn better than those working with the Pinyin presentation. The experiment found that in addition to effective multimedia, three critical factors contribute to the success of Chinese character recognition: (a) L2 processing strategies which are different from L1, (b) overall L2 linguistic knowledge, especially orthographic knowledge of Chinese radicals and strokes, and finally (c) metalinguistic awareness, i.e. sensitivity to orthographic regularity.
