ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the factors involved in children's learning to read Chinese. Several arguments have been advanced to support a basic distinction between the processes involved in reading a logographic writing system, such as Chinese, and an alphabetic writing system, such as English. The chapter discusses the distinctions between pictographs, ideographs, and logographs. The Chinese writing system can be best described, not as a pictographic or an ideographic writing system, but as a logographic system, one in which characters represents the minimal meaningful units of the language. The right component of the character provides information about pronunciation. A different perspective on the relation of the cognitive tasks to reading emerges when the tasks are grouped into verbal and performance tasks. Five tasks relied on verbal response: serial memory for words and numbers, verbal memory, vocabulary, and general information.
