摘要
In this paper, the view that Chinese characters do not carry phonological information and the view that they are pictographs are argued to be incorrect. On the contrary, Chinese orthographs have considerable phonetic information, similar to alphabetic writing systems, and they have internal structure. Evidence for this claim is drawn from findings concerning the reading performances of normal Chinese subjects and of a brain-injured patient, and the writing performance of Chinese dysgraphic patients. In particular, normal subjects were found to name phonetic compounds whose phonetic component has a high consistency value faster than those containing a phonetic component low in consistency value. This effect of consistency was also observed in the reading of pseudo-characters made up of a signific and a phonetic (Fang, Horng, and Tzeng 1986; Hue and Erickson 1988; Lian 1985). The non-phonetic view regarding the Chinese writing system contends that Chinese lacks a non-lexical route of reading; it thus implies that character reading is achieved post-lexically. However, this is seriously challenged by a report about a Chinese brain-damaged patient who could read invented as well as real characters effortlessly, despite little comprehension of the characters (Tzeng, Hung, Lu, Chen, and Hu 1992). Writing errors from several dysgraphic patients of a study investigating the writing processes in Chinese found that the signific and the phonetic may be substituted, deleted, or inserted. These errors indicate that the signific and the phonetic must correspond to units or constituents at some level of cognitive processing, suggesting that the orthographic representations of phonetic compounds contain information about the content and the position of their signific and phonetic component. The use of evidence from neuropathology in this paper illustrates how data from brain-damaged individuals may inform and constrain models of the cognitive system, as practiced by cognitive neuropsychologists.