Keynote Address: Reading Chinese script: Insights from more than four decades of research

Abstract:

Because of its unique structure, the Chinese script provides challenging opportunities to explore both script-specific processes and the universality of theories developed from the study of reading in alphabetic writing systems. There has been substantial progress over the past few decades in understanding how written Chinese is processed, though much work remains to be done. In this talk, I will review main properties of the Chinese script, discuss related studies and the implications of their results, and propose directions that I see as being crucial to its future development.