published_or_final_version / abstract / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / abstract / Educational Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

Chin Ho Leung. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 55-58).

林嵐. / 論文 (藝術碩士)--香港中文大學, 1999. / 參考文獻 (leaves [1-3] (3rd group)) / 附中英文摘要. / Lin Lan. / Lun wen (yi shu shuo shi)-- Xianggang Zhong wen da xue, 1999. / Can kao wen xian (leaves [1-3] (3rd group)) / Fu Zhong Ying wen zhai yao. / 前言 --- p.1 / Chapter 第一章 --- 中國文字的特色 --- p.2 / Chapter 第一節 --- 漢字的美學價値 --- p.3 / 漢字的形、音、義 / 豐富的靈感泉源 / 文字的特殊美學觀 / Chapter 第二節 --- 漢字的權力象徵意義 --- p.6 / Chapter 第二章 --- 中國文字與藝術 --- p.10 / Chapter 第一節 --- 文字與文人畫 --- p.10 / 文字與書法 / 書法與中國畫 / Chapter 第二節 --- 文字與現代藝術創作 --- p.12 / Chapter 第三章 --- 當代中國藝術家的文字情結 --- p.16 / Chapter 第一節 --- 借用中國書法的形式或形態爲主題的藝術家 --- p.16 / 趙無極 / 王己千 / Chapter 第二節 --- 以文字作文化符號思考的藝術家 --- p.18 / 吳山專 / 谷文達 / 徐冰 / Chapter 第三節 --- 保持文字功能性的藝術家 --- p.22 / 侯俊明 / 郭孟浩 / 結語 --- p.25 / 附錄一：參考書目及雜誌 / 附錄二：圖錄 / 附錄三：圖片來源

This dissertation examines the modern Chinese script crisis in twentieth-century China. It situates the Chinese script crisis within the modern phenomenon of phonocentrism - the systematic privileging of speech over writing. It depicts the Chinese experience as an integral part of a worldwide crisis of non-alphabetic scripts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It places the crisis of Chinese characters at the center of the making of modern Chinese language, literature, and culture. It investigates how the script crisis and the ensuing script revolution intersect with significant historical processes such as the Chinese engagement in the two World Wars, national and international education movements, the Communist revolution, and national salvation. Since the late nineteenth century, the Chinese writing system began to be targeted as the roadblock to literacy, science and democracy. Chinese and foreign scholars took the abolition of Chinese script to be the condition of modernity. A script revolution was launched as the Chinese response to the script crisis. This dissertation traces the beginning of the crisis to 1916, when Chao Yuen Ren published his English article "The Problem of the Chinese Language," sweeping away all theoretical oppositions to alphabetizing the Chinese script. This was followed by two major movements dedicated to the task of eradicating Chinese characters: First, the Chinese Romanization Movement spearheaded by a group of Chinese and international scholars which was quickly endorsed by the Guomingdang (GMD) Nationalist government in the 1920s; Second, the dissident Chinese Latinization Movement initiated in the Soviet Union and championed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the 1930s. This crisis was brought to an abrupt end in 1958, when Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the People's Republic of China, relegated the Romanization system pinyin to an official auxiliary status, secondary to Chinese characters, thus concluding the half-century struggle between the Chinese script and the alphabet. The final containment of the script crisis was partly a political decision of the new socialist state, and partly the result of the use of "baihua." The multivalent term baihua--plain speech, vernacular, and a colloquialized written language--enabled an unlikely reconciliation between the phonocentric dreams of a Chinese alphabet and a character-based Chinese national language and literature. This alternative solution to the script crisis, which grew from within the Chinese script, was rehearsed in the first modern Chinese anti-illiteracy program in France during the Great War. The solution was consolidated as a colloquialized written Chinese became the staple of modern Chinese literary writing. The negotiated baihua--imprinted profoundly by the phonocentric-biased discourse- on the one hand registers the historical reality of the modern Chinese writing as a written language; on the other, it keeps alive the phonocentric dreams of modern China.

This dissertation explores the global history of Chinese script reforms—the effort to phoneticize Chinese language and/or simplify the writing system—from its inception in the 1890s to its demise in the 1980s. These reforms took place at the intersection of industrialization, colonialism, and new information technologies, such as alphabet-based telegraphy and breakthroughs in printing technologies. As these social and technological transformations put unprecedented pressure on knowledge management and the use of mental and clerical labor, many Chinese intellectuals claimed that learning Chinese characters consumed too much time and mental energy. Chinese script reforms, this dissertation argues, were an effort to increase speed in producing, transmitting, and accessing information, and thus meet the demands of the industrializing knowledge economy. The industrializing knowledge economy that this dissertation explores was built on and sustained by a psychological understanding of the human subject as a knowledge machine, and it was part of a global moment in which the optimization of labor in knowledge production was a key concern for all modernizing economies. While Chinese intellectuals were inventing new signs of inscription, American behavioral psychologists, Soviet psycho-economists, and Central Asian and Ottoman technicians were all experimenting with new scripts in order to increase mental efficiency and productivity. This dissertation reveals the intimate connections between the Chinese and non-Chinese script engineering projects that were taking place synchronically across the world. The chapters of this work demonstrate for the first time, for instance, that the simplification of Chinese characters in the 1920s and 1930s was intimately connected to the discipline of behavioral psychology in the US. The first generation of Chinese psychologists employed the American psychologists’ methods to track eye movements, count word-frequencies, and statistically analyze the speed of reading, writing, and memorizing in order to simplify and “rationalize” the Chinese writing system in an effort to discipline and optimize mental labor. Other chapters explore the issue of mental and clerical optimization by finding the origins of the Chinese Latin Alphabet (CLA), the mother of pinyin, in hitherto unknown Eurasian connections. The CLA, the pages of this work shows, was the product of a transnational exchange that involved Ottoman and Transcaucasian typographers as well as Russian engineers and Chinese communists who sought efficiency in knowledge production through inventing new scripts. Situating the Chinese script reforms at this global intersection of psychology, economy, and linguistics, this dissertation examines the global connections and forces that turned the human subject into a knowledge worker who was cognitively managed through education, literacy, propaganda, and other measures of organizing information, all of which had the script at the center. The search for efficiency and productivity—the core values of industrialism—lay at the heart of script reforms in China, but this search was inseparable from linguistic orders and political ambitions. Even if writing, transmitting, and learning a phonetic script could theoretically be easier and more efficient than the Chinese characters, the alphabet opened a veritable Pandora’s Box around the issue of selection: given the complex linguistic landscape in China, which speech was a phonetic script supposed to represent? There were myriad languages spoken throughout the empire and the subsequent nation-state, most of which were mutually incomprehensible. Mandarin as spoken in Beijing was different from that spoken in the south, and “topolects” or regional languages such as Min or Cantonese were to Mandarin what Romanian is to English. As a linguistic life-or-death issue, phonetic scripts stood for the infrastructural possibilities and limitations in the representation of speeches. Some scripts, such as Lao Naixuan’s phonetic script composed of more than a hundred signs, were capable of representing multiple Mandarin and non-Mandarin speeches; whereas others, such as Phonetic Symbols that only has thirty-seven syllabic signs, represented only one speech, i.e., Mandarin. Using Mandarin-oriented scripts to transcribe non-Mandarin speeches was like writing English with fifteen letters, hence the acrimonious disputes that fill the pages of this dissertation. Succinctly put, it was at the level of script invention that Chinese and non-Chinese actors engineered different infrastructures not only for laboring minds but also for the social world of Chinese languages. The history of information technologies and knowledge economy in China was thus inseparable from the world of speech and language, as each script offered a new potential to reassemble the written matter and the speaking mind in a different way. “Codes of Modernity” thus conceptualizes the script itself as an infrastructural medium. A script was not merely a passive carrier of information, but an existential artifact. Building on an expanding literature on infrastructures, it endorses the observation that infrastructures, technologies, and the social world around them work in a recursive loop. An infrastructure is not just the physical object that permits the flow of information, goods, ideas, and people, but a sociotechnical product that enables the experience of culture, while imposing constrains on it at the same time. Like electricity grids, transportation systems, and sewage canals, the experience of scripts as infrastructures is the experience of thought worlds. After a long tradition of structuralism and poststructuralism that sought to understand the world through the semiotic prism of language, “Codes of Modernity” argues that it is time for an infrastructuralism that excavates the indispensable media that enable the production of language and thought.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 1989.

Holistic processing and left-side bias are both behavioral markers of expert face recognition. In contrast, expertise in Chinese character recognition involves left-side bias but reduced holistic processing (Hsiao & Cottrell, 2009). Here I hypothesized that this reduction in holistic processing may be related to writing rather than reading experience. In Experiment 1, I tested Chinese literates who could read and write Chinese characters fluently (Writers), and Chinese literates who had limited writing practices and thus had reading performance far exceeding their writing ability (Limited-writers). I found that Writers perceived Chinese characters less holistically than Limited-writers. In contrast to what previous research suggested, reduction in holistic processing in Chinese readers depended on writing experience instead of reading performance. In addition, reading performance was affected by font familiarity and context for Limited-writers but not Writers. Writing experience seems to enhance analytic processing and awareness of orthographic components of Chinese characters, which may in turn facilitate reading in unfamiliar fonts. By contrast, both Writers and Limited-writers showed a similar level of left-side bias in processing symmetric Chinese characters, suggesting that left-side bias is a consistent expertise marker for orthographic processing uninfluenced by writing experience. In Experiment 2, I investigate the developmental trend of holistic processing in Chinese character recognition and its relationship with reading and writing abilities by testing Chinese children who were learning Chinese at a public elementary school in Hong Kong on these abilities. I found that the holistic processing effect of Chinese characters in children was reduced as they reached higher grades; this reduction was driven by enhanced Chinese literacy rather than age. In addition, I found that writing performance predicts reading performance through reduced holistic processing as a mediator. Overall, the results of this study suggest that writing hones analytic processing, which is essential for expert Chinese character recognition, and in turn facilitates learning to read in Chinese. This study is also the first to identify Limited-writers as a window onto basic processes of reading. / HKU 3 Minute Thesis Award, 2nd Runner-up (2012) / published_or_final_version / Psychology / Master / Master of Philosophy

Chinese characters are used by about one-fifth of the world population. Each character can generally be analyzed and represented at three orthographic levels including single stroke, component and whole character. Regardless of the number of strokes a Chinese character has, it always occupies a square area. Such special spatial layout leads to a great variation in stroke density, i.e., visual complexity, among Chinese characters. Here in this thesis, the effects of visual complexity on Chinese character recognition were examined to investigate the visual processing of Chinese characters in both central and peripheral vision. Empirical findings from four psychophysical studies will be reported. First, the efficiency of detecting and recognizing Chinese characters of different complexity levels was studied. Human recognition of a more complex Chinese character was found to be generally less efficient than that of a simpler one. The relationship between efficiency and complexity had a log-log slope of approximately -1, suggesting that the basic features for recognizing a single Chinese character might be less complex than the simplest object used, which is a single stroke. Analysis results of the detection and recognition efficiency were consistent with a two-stage processing model of Chinese character recognition—feature detection followed by feature integration. Results in peripheral vision suggested that the feature integration process was adversely influenced by internal crowding. Second, the spatial frequency characteristics of recognizing Chinese characters of different complexity levels were examined. The results showed that the peak tuning frequency for recognizing a more complex Chinese character was higher and the bandwidth of the spatial tuning functions was narrower than for recognizing a simpler character. In addition, the effects of size on such spatial frequency characteristics depended on the complexity level. The comparison of human performance against the corresponding performance of a CSF-limited ideal observer model implied that the processing mechanism of recognizing simple and complex characters was different. Moreover, similar results were observed among native Chinese and non-Chinese readers, suggesting that expertise might not influence front end processing properties such as the spatial frequency characteristics of Chinese character recognition. Third, the importance of utilizing spatial frequency information of different orientations (i.e., horizontal versus vertical) in Chinese character recognition was investigated. Results showed higher efficiency in utilizing vertical than horizontal stroke information for Chinese character recognition among native Chinese readers whereas non-Chinese readers used both vertical and horizontal stroke information similarly. Fourth, the effects of the target-flanker similarity in complexity on crowding in Chinese character recognition were examined. The results suggested that the behavior of feature integration process in peripheral vision might be consistent with summation theory, which stresses on the relationship between the processing capacity of neurons and the processing demand of stimuli. The “excessive feature integration explanation” of crowding was also discussed in the context of the current findings. Building on previous research in the literature, results from the four studies in this thesis were synthesized in a proposal of a visual information processing model for Chinese character recognition. / published_or_final_version / Psychology / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Language Studies / Master / Master of Arts