主题：【原创】浅谈汉字与拼音文字的比较 （上） -- 人间树

AUTHOR: Xuehong Lü; Jie Zhang

TITLE: Reading efficiency: A comparative study of English and Chinese orthographies

SOURCE: Reading Research and Instruction 38 no4 301-17 Summ 1999

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ABSTRACT

This project studies variation in reading speed between languages of different orthographies. Modern Chinese with logographic characters and English with alphabetic written systems are the two languages under study. It is hypothesized that native Chinese readers read faster than native English readers on the same reading comprehension test. College freshmen (126 from Capital Normal University in China and 111 from Brigham Young University in the USA) were asked to read 16 passages selected from standardized foreign language tests (8 from TOEFL and 8 from HSK) and answer multiple choice questions (60 in total) that follow each of the passages. Findings indicate that the Chinese readers (24.7 minutes) are faster than the English readers (26.6 minutes) by about 2 minutes on the same reading material. The difference is significant even with reading comprehension being held constant. Results have implications on teaching Chinese as foreign language and the Chinese written language reform.

Reading is a comprehensive process originating from the orthographic script of the language. Learning to read Arabic is different from learning to read German or English, and all three are different from learning to read Chinese. Since reading involves decoding of the script, and languages in the world are written with different systems, reading efficiency should vary from one system to another.

According to Perfetti (1985), the critical difference among writing systems is how the units of the writing system, the script, code the units of the language. At one extreme is the system that clearly codes the sound of the language, such as most Indo-European languages including English and the man-made Esperanto. At the other extreme is a writing system that directly codes meaning. Early picture writing offers the earliest examples of such a system, and today's abstract representations or ideographs are also common in meaning-based writing systems. In fact, Chinese remains the most widely used meaning-based writing system in which ideographs and pictographs are prominent (Perfetti, 1985).

English alphabetic and Chinese logographic systems are typical of the orthographical differences. Because of the "radical compound" nature of Chinese characters, reading Chinese may not necessarily involve the decoding of the script as English readers have to do. In other words, a Chinese native reader may not have to transform the script into pronunciation before fully understanding the meaning of the word (Au, 1992; Rozin et al., 1971). Additionally, for the same amount of information, written Chinese takes less space than written English, so that less eye fixation should be required in reading Chinese. Therefore, the Chinese reading process for a native reader can be less time consuming than reading English for an English native reader.

An exhaustive review of literature has located a very limited number of studies comparing reading efficiencies in English and Chinese. The only studies that directly address reading speed in English and Chinese have been done by Gray (1956) and Just, Carpenter, and Wu (1983). However, these two studies contain some flaws in sampling, instrumentation, and measurement, caused possibly by lack of funding as well as lack of the researchers' knowledge of the Chinese language. Thus, neither study was able to test the hypothesis proposed in this current research. Therefore, a more straightforward measure of reading efficiency is needed.

This research issue is significant both in teaching Chinese as a foreign language and in the Chinese written language reform. The contemporary history of Chinese language has witnessed several reforms or attempted reforms in its writing system. Beyond the simplification of Chinese characters, the radical reformists have advocated romanization of the Chinese writing system. The essential purpose of the language is communication, and efficiency is a measure of the merits of a language. Results from this research project may provide scientific evidence to support or oppose the language reform proposals in both simplification and romanization.