ABSTRACT
The Chinese script has often been characterized as pictographic or logographic, and considered a deep orthography in the sense that the relationship between orthographic and phonological forms is very opaque. An overarching question is whether the processes underlying oral and/or written production of characters differ from those in alphabetic systems, and if so, in what ways? Compared with a sizeable literature on character recognition and naming from normal readers and speakers with dyslexia, the body of work on writing disorders is much smaller. Nonetheless, much insight has been gained in recent years from reports of Chinese individuals with acquired writing disorders into the issues concerning the basic unit of writing, the internal structure of orthographic representation of characters, and the functional architecture of the lexical system supporting character writing.
