Character Amnesia

Character Amnesia An investigation into the challenge of writing Chinese characters and kanji for native speakers of languages using logographic scripts 1. Introduction 1.1 Overview In our increasingly globalized, homogenized, technology-reliant world, little research has been conducted on the influence modern communication devices have on native speakers of various languages. It must be recognised that there is a growing problem for native speakers of Chinese languages (inc. Modern Standard Chinese, Cantonese etc) and Japanese in that they are forgetting how to write their language. Among the super languages of the 21st century, MSC holds a unique position in that it uses phono-logographic ideograms, more commonly known as „Chinese characters‟ as its principle orthography. In Japan, traditional versions of these same characters (called kanji) are used alongside the native syllabaries hiragana and katakana. „Character amnesia‟ is the phenomenon of how many (mostly) young, educated, upwardly mobile native Chinese and Japanese speakers are experiencing difficulty recalling and writing their language without recourse to a referential aid (i.e. character look-up programs on one‟s mobile phone or computer). The widespread uptake of modern technologies in China and Japan (email, mobile phones etc.) has had the unintended consequence of re-wiring the brain in favour of alphabet/syllabary-based processing, consistent with the romanized input methods available on such technologies. While there has been little science-based research conducted on the issue of character amnesia, it is nevertheless vital that academics raise relevant questions about the various outcomes that could arise should character amnesia continue to grow with each generation. Pair this with the undoubtedly exponential increase in interest the world will have in China this century, and the spread of the use of Chinese languages both within and outside China, and one sees many opinions, many theories, many brains, searching for an optimum means of written communication with the nativeChinese speaker. This essay investigates the clash between the world‟s oldest continually used script and the impact of modern technology. It is also concerned with how the nativeChinese-speaker‟s brain operates and how this issue could cause our (fantastically) plastic brain to adjust to a new, technology-reliant normal. The issues presented in this essay also raise questions for academics of other disciplines, such as: how are the Chinese and Japanese governments likely to react/are reacting to the phenomenon of character amnesia? How will domestic policies in these countries regarding education be affected? This phenomenon of character amnesia has, to date, had extensive (mostly alarmist) media coverage, but very little academic input. I hope that this small contribution can help to initiate a multi-disciplinary conversation about the future of MSC and Japanese in our globalized world, and offer solutions to the problems faced by a generation struggling to engage with the script of their native language. 1.2 A note on the difference between speech and script “Children are wired for sound, but print is an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted on.” Stephen Pinker, in McGuinness, 1997. One thing we must first acknowledge is the deep and complex divide between speech and script. If one follows the findings of geneticist Oppenheimer and his work analysing skull and spinal modifications relating to speech production in early humans, then the emergence of (oral) language can be dated back 2.5 million years (Oppenheimer, 2004). This data competes with the theory of heavy-weight linguist and outspoken academic Noam Chomsky, who insists that speech emerged spontaneously 35,000 to 50,000 years ago. Regardless of these arguments, the first writing systems are, at most, only 6,000 years old. Here we must differentiate between writing, and a writing system. Current evidence of our first attempts to record information, i.e. to write, can be dated back to 8000 - 4000 BC for tokens found in west Asia (Schmandt-Besserat, 1978), but the civilization laying claim to the first writing system is still a hotly debated topic, with Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs being the two main contenders. However, Chinese characters are the oldest continually used writing system in the world, with an evolutionary lineage that can be systematically traced back to the Shang Dynasty of 1600BC (Boltz, 1986) and the beautiful inscriptions that appeared on Bronze Age bells. It is for this reason – the burden of carrying such history and the power that comes with the prestige of having the world‟s oldest script – that Chinese characters will not, suddenly, cease to be in use. This is an important argument to make, and one that I will refer back to later in the essay. 2. The Logographic Brain How does the brain of a native logographic script-based language-user work? How is it different from the alphabet-reading brain? What might we see in the brain of an individual with character amnesia? These questions are of vital importance and must be addressed as comprehensively as possible in order for linguists, behavioural psychologists and neurologists to offer insightful, creative solutions to the problem of character amnesia. “The alphabet-reading brain differs substantially from that of the … logosyllabary reader in the decreased amount of cortical space it needs in some areas. Specifically, the alphabet reader learns to rely more on the posterior of the left hemisphere…the Chinese achieve efficiency by recruiting many areas for specialized, automatic processing across both hemispheres.” Wolf, 2007: 61. “Neuroimaging studies of reading thus reliably reveal a broad network of brain regions that are plausibly related to higher visual processing (occipito-temporal cortex, or the „visual word form area‟), phonological processing (posterior portions of middle and superior temporal and opercular inferior frontal gyrus) and semantic processing (triangular inferior frontal gyrus …).” Yang et al., 2011. Engaging with studies in neurology is inherently a terminology-laden quagmire of brain areas and processing paths, but for our purposes it is necessary to be as clear as possible about such areas of brain activity so as to predict where the activity may be less automatic, less fluent, in that of a fluent speaker suffering character amnesia. The important points to note from the excerpts above are that the Chinese reader differs from that of the alphabetic reader in that it uses areas in both brain hemispheres to accomplish the task of reading, and that the reading of characters involves a network of brain activity with neural pathways created only from repetition of a learned action (see Yu et al., 2011 “A Chinese character is composed of a finite set of strokes whose order in writing follows consensual principles and is learnt through school education.”) Chinese characters as read by native Chinese speakers are a mixture of phonologographic (the character contains both phonological and semantic components) and logographic (the character contains only semantic components, or is purely orthographic) graphemes. Over 80% of the logographs in Chinese script are formed on a principle of compositional duality – one part of the character referring to meaning, the other referring to pronunciation (Tzeng et al., 1983). By using 20 characters whose components correspond to one of the three categories (phonological and semantic, only semantic, or only orthographic), Yang et al. (2011) were able to perform a comprehensive fMRI (frequency Magnetic Resonance Imaging) study of how the sublexical structure of characters are processed by the brain. Separating the task of reading into spatial, phonological, and semantic processes allows us to better understand the hive of neurological activity that occurs during the reading process. First, spatial calculations occur in the occipital lobe. More specifically, the ventral occipitotemporal cortex (OT) is observed to be active when the subject is presented with characters as stimuli (an area that is active in readers of any script). This posterior area of the brain enables us to decide if the symbols presented are „words‟ and worthy of further processing, or if the symbols are a foreign, and no more than a meaningless scribble. Yang et al. observed that the OT “responds more strongly to real words or characters than to the artificial stimuli…”. Additionally in the logographic reader, Brodmann‟s area 37 of the temporal lobe is utilised as an area of object recognition (Wolf, 2007: 36). Next, activity to deduce phonological information occurs in the dorsal processing stream (which connects the occipital lobe with the upper temporal lobe and lower parietal lobe) and the right middle frontal gyrus (Kuo et al., 2004). Interestingly, this dorsal processing stream is the same route used by not-yet-fluent alphabet readers. Wolf notes that “…this slower pathway (sometimes called the dorsal route) allows the younger child time to assemble the phonemes within a word. It also allows more “look-up” time for all the various representations attached to words.” (Wolf, 2007: 142). The fluent alphabet reader eventually creates a system of storage for pattern and word representations entirely in the left hemisphere (a streamlined process called the ventral system), but this is a transition that the logographic brain will not make – the process of retrieving data in order to comprehend the grapheme requires various brain areas for spatial, phonological and semantic comprehension, therefore a localised system cannot be developed. Of course, this does not mean that both systems cannot exist in the same brain – they can and do in the brains of fluent Japanese readers. Because Japanese script consists of both logographic script and two syllabaries, the Japanese reader has a highly developed dorsal and ventral system. What must be made clear however, is that hiragana and katakana (the syllabaries) is read faster than kanji (Feldman and Turvey, 1980) and though the speed of brain processing is measured in hundredths of milliseconds, it is widely accepted among neurologists and linguists that reading logographic script is more taxing on the brain than reading an alphabet or a syllabary (see also Koyama et al., 2008 and Yamada, 1992). Though there has been much exceptional work done in identifying areas of the brain involved in the reading process, there is currently very little qualitative data about the brain when it is in the process of writing. Medical studies referenced thus far (specifically Kuo et al., 2004; Yang et al., 2011; Yu et al, 2011) involved analysing the brain activity as shown in the colour-coded output of fMRI technology, and because these machines require the subject to remain as still as possible during the examination process, the only data available relates to areas of the brain activated when a reading task is performed. Other fMRI studies (Ferretti et al., 2001) have involved the subject performing minimal hand-gestures: tapping the thumb and forefinger, and writing the letter „I‟ repeatedly. Although this study found evidence of similarity between the neural pathways that elicit finger tapping and the pathways that elicit hand-writing, I would argue that this does not require the subject to recall the letter „I‟ in the same way or to the same extent that recall is required when writing a phono-logographic grapheme on command. Slightly more useful is the 2001 fMRI study by Japanese neurologists (Katanoda et al., 2001) who asked subjects to (1) write the kanji of images displayed on a screen with the right index finger (2) name images silently and (3) tap one‟s finger to visual cues. They noticed activity in the (left superior) parietal lobe (as mentioned above, this area is also involved in phonological processing) and superior frontal gyrus when the writing task was studied, but not during the naming or finger tapping. “Stimuli consisted of… watercolor pictures of concrete objects. Items for the pictures were selected from commonly used words comprising one to three syllables from categories such as animals, plants, and buildings.” (Katanoda et al., 2001), but note that the purpose of this study was to compare images of a healthy brain in the writing process to a brain with acquired dyslexia or dysgraphia. On the topic of character amnesia, the data required would involve a study of the activity of a healthy brain in a free, creative writing process (as opposed to a brain reacting to stimuli), and instead of comparing the activity of a healthy brain to an afflicted brain, we want data comparing a literate Chinese writer of a certain age who has been exposed to modern technology, to a writer of the same age who has not been exposed to technology and thus has spent many more hours involved in the neuromuscular exercise that is writing. Even in very recent studies and with all the data available on the reading brain, conclusions about brain areas involved in writing are wrapped in tentative language, such as “…it is possible that the left-fusiform encodes dynamic sequence information in Character writing” (Yu et al., 2011). As noted above, the logographic brain utilizes different areas of the brain when reading, compared to the alphabetic brain when reading, and therefore one can cautiously assume that there is also some degree of difference between the logographic and alphabetic brain when involved in the writing process. However, until neurologists have a method by which to „see‟ areas of brain activity whilst the subject is writing more than just a single letter or tracing a tiny, single character with their finger in an fMRI machine, we can only acknowledge the problem of character amnesia from the increasing amount of people who have experienced its effects on their otherwise fully-literate life. 3. The Case for Character Amnesia – Quantitive Data „Character amnesia‟ is a term that first gained media prominence in Jennifer Lee‟s 2001 New York Times article, “Where the PC is Mightier Than the Pen” (Lee, 2001), however the only acknowledgement of this phenomenon by an academic is in the blog of Victor Mair, a Sinologist from the University of Pennsylvania. In 2010, in a post entitled “Character Amnesia” (Mair, 2010), Mair notes that: “Because of their complexity and multiplicity, writing Chinese characters correctly is a highly neuromuscular task. One simply has to practice them hundreds and hundreds of times to master them. And, as with playing a musical instrument like a violin or a piano, one must practice writing them regularly or one‟s control over them will simply evaporate.” (Mair, 2010) Mair gives examples of friends forgetting how to write words such as „shrimp‟, and reflects on the difficulty the average literate Chinese must have on recalling more obscure characters such as zhā: simplified - 皻 or traditional - 齇 (red flecks on the nose of a drunk person) but notes that there is no evidence of individuals actually forgetting these words, only the way they are written. Later in the piece Mair refers to a survey he conducted with native Chinese speakers, asking what their preferred IME (input method editor) was for inputting characters to devices such as computers, mobile phones etc. 98% responded with a preference for using pinyin input, with the remainder stating that they preferred stroke-recognition programs where one draws the character using a stylus. Mair comments that the respondents who prefer the latter are from Hong Kong and Taiwan where the use of traditional characters is still the norm. However is unfortunate that Mair is not more specific in asking exactly which pinyin system was preferred – there are many variations on pinyin input programs, with some designed especially for smart phones and some designed for computers. Additionally, there was no mention of wŭ bĭ shū rù fă 五笔输入法, a keyboard-based method whereby each (English) letter corresponds to a stroke, with characters entered by typing the letters corresponding to up to the first five strokes (HKTV, 2012). This method is preferred in business circles in China and is believed by some to be a more efficient method of input than pinyin (Li Wang, personal correspondence, October 2012). Of the several newspaper/online newspaper articles collected for this essay, Jennifer Lee‟s piece is by far the most comprehensive. Along with anecdotal evidence from Chinese citizens of various professions who say they occasionally suffer from „tí bĭ wàng zì‟ 提笔忘字 (pick up the pen, forget the character), Lee also asks for opinions on the future of the Chinese writing system. Professor Ping Xu of Baruch College, New York insists that because of the ease-of-use of computers, we should encourage those who wish to learn Chinese by placing less emphasis on character-writing exercises. “Why would you still spend so much time on handwriting Chinese characters when you are eventually going to use computers?” For many speakers using logographic script, that „eventually‟ is right now. In 2011 a BBC news article reported “Schools in China have been told to run more classes in calligraphy because computer use and text-messaging are ruining children‟s writing style” (BBC, 2011). The reason given by the Education Ministry for the new priority was for the benefit of the children – that they should be trained in correct writing habits and that they should know how to use soft and hard brushes. Additionally, the more recent findings from Japan‟s Cultural Affairs Agency released in September 2012 which questioned Japanese citizens about their use of Japanese (both spoken and written) showed that “66.5 percent of people think they are losing the ability to correctly handwrite kanji or Chinese characters because they write e-mails with computers and cell phones on a daily basis”. (Yomiuri Shinbun, 2012). Another 42% of respondents said that they felt that “writing by hand was a bother”. From a neurolinguistic perspective, this feeling is absolutely justified. The brain expends far more energy writing than it does reading, and it expends more energy on logographic scripts than it does on alphabets or syllabaries. Choosing from a selection of character or kanji options on a screen is easier on the brain, but note that there have been no qualitative science-based studies (yet) to say whether this method is actually physically quicker than writing graphemes by hand. However, this data competes with a deeply ingrained cultural attachment to logographic script that I would argue is felt by both Chinese and Japanese (as the question of „what is the future of kanji?‟ was apparently not included in the survey). I would posit that Chinese characters will not be replaced by pinyin in China because of the cultural and historical weight they carry; the pride and unification that comes with using an ancient script that transcends language and dialectical variation for communication across China is not something that can be replaced with romanization. The opinion that lends the greatest weight to this argument is that of the creator of pinyin, Youguang Zhao, who insists that characters will not fall out of favour with native speakers of Chinese (for full interview, see Planet Word, 2011). In Japan, I believe kanji will not be wholly replaced with kana for several, similar reasons. In the words of one Japanese blogger: “I am against the idea that it is fine that young people forget how to write kanji since kanji is an important (part of) culture for both Japan and China, (therefore) we should know how to write them correctly.” (Setunyan, 2012). There is both a sense of national pride that comes with the many unique Japan-only characters (kokuji) and a notion that kanji are Japanese; they are based on traditional (rather than simplified) Chinese characters and an absence of kanji can render a text extremely ambiguous (a device loved by Japanese waka poets who preferred the ambiguity of writing in kana than with kanji). 4. Conclusion Writing, unlike speech, is a skill. It is, unlike speech, “…an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted on”. While it took our brains several thousand years to move from writing to writing systems, we expect children to transition from speech to script in their first ten years. Neurologists have comprehensively and thoughtfully examine the reading brain, and with this data we can begin to make informed assumptions about that next great frontier in neurology: the writing brain. Although there is much anecdotal data regarding the phenomenon of character amnesia in the native-speaker of a logographic script language, it has not yet been subject to rigorous scientific experimentation or analysis. 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