Investigating Semantic Alignment in Character Learning of Chinese as a Foreign Language: The Use and Effect of the Imagery Based Encoding Strategy

For learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL), character learning is frustrating. This research postulated that this difficulty may mainly come from a lack of semantic understanding of character-denoted meanings. Language theories support that when a learner’s semantic meaning increases, the orthographic structures that represent the underlying meanings also improve. This study aimed to reveal CFL learners’ cognitive abilities and processes in visual-semantic learning of Chinese characters. Particularly, this study investigated the process by which English-speaking adolescent CFL learners, at the beginning to intermediate level, made mental images of character-denoted meanings to visually encode and retrieve character forms. Quantitative and qualitative data were gathered from image making questionnaires, writing, and reading tests, after learning characters in three commonly-used teaching methods (i.e., English, pictorial, and verbal). The data were analyzed based on a triangulation of the literature from Neuro-Semantic Language Learning Theory, scientific findings in cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. The study found that participants’ semantic abilities to understand character-denoted meanings emerged, but were still restricted in familiar orthographic forms. The use of the imagery strategy as a semantic ability predicted better performances, most evidently in writing; however, the ability in using the imagery strategy to learn characters was still underdeveloped, and needed to be supported with sufficient contextual information. Implications and further research in visual-semantic learning and teaching characters were suggested

SCML: A Structural Representation for Chinese Characters

Chinese characters are used daily by well over a billion people. They constitute the main writing system of China and Taiwan, form a major part of written Japanese, and are also used in South Korea. Anything more than a cursory glance at these characters will reveal a high degree of structure to them, but computing systems do not currently have a means to operate on this structure. Existing character databases and dictionaries treat them as numerical code points, and associate with them additional `hand-computed\u27 data, such as stroke count, stroke order, and other information to aid in specific searches. Searching by a character\u27s `shape\u27 is effectively impossible in these systems. I propose a new approach to representing these characters, through an XML-based language called SCML. This language, by encoding an abstract form of a character, allows the direct retrieval of important information such as stroke count and stroke order, and permits useful but previously impossible automated analysis of characters. In addition, the system allows the design of a view that takes abstract SCML representations as character models and outputs glyphs based on an aesthetic, facilitating the creation of `meta-fonts\u27 for Chinese characters. Finally, through the creation of a specialized database, SCML allows for efficient structural character queries to be performed against the body of inserted characters, thus allowing people to search by the most obvious of a character\u27s characteristics: its shape

Chinese information processing

A survey of the field of Chinese information processing is provided. It covers the following areas: the Chinese writing system, several popular Chinese encoding schemes and code conversions, Chinese keyboard entry methods, Chinese fonts, Chinese operating systems, basic Chinese computing techniques and applications

Adaptive pattern recognition of hand-written Chinese characters using Fourier transforms of projection profiles

None provided

The Effect of Instructional Embodiment Designs on Chinese Language Learning: The Use of Embodied Animation for Beginning Learners of Chinese Characters

The focus of this study was an investigation of the effects of embodied animation on the retention outcomes of Chinese character learning (CCL) for beginning learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL). Chinese characters have three main features: semantic meaning, pronunciation, and written form. Chinese characters are different from English words in that they are non-alphabetic orthographies. Though popular, they are deemed very hard to learn. However, Chinese character processing is found to be neurologically related to human body movements, or at least the imagination of them. Literature also indicated the importance of embodied cognition, imagination, and technology use in human language memory and learning. The design of embodied animation for a computer-based CCL program is developed which consists of three types of characters. The study used Between-Subject Post-test Only Control Group experimental design with sixty-nine adults. The study compared five learning conditions: embodied animation learning (EAL), human-image animation learning (HAL), object-image animation learning, no-animation etymology learning, and traditional learning (serving as a control group). Participants in the EAL group perceived the character etymological animation, and then a video clip depicting the moving actions of human body movements and/or gestures which show the semantic meaning and the written form of the character. The study found that the EAL group outperformed the other learning groups with medium to large effects. Specifically, after one week of learning, the EAL group outperformed the other groups in terms of learners' free recall of Chinese characters, in characters' meaning-form mappings, and in characters' form-meaning and-sound mappings. Furthermore, the EAL group performed better than the other groups in the retention of all three types of characters (i.e., pictograph, indicative, and ideograph). Therefore, findings revealed the positive effects of embodied animation on CCL. In addition, the HAL group showed promising retention rate by constantly performing the second best in all tasks. The study also revealed that pictographs and indicatives were better learned than ideographs across groups. Drawing from the study, the use of embodied animation in a computer-based program is suggested to be effective on character learning for beginning learners of CFL

Information Preserving Processing of Noisy Handwritten Document Images

Many pre-processing techniques that normalize artifacts and clean noise induce anomalies due to discretization of the document image. Important information that could be used at later stages may be lost. A proposed composite-model framework takes into account pre-printed information, user-added data, and digitization characteristics. Its benefits are demonstrated by experiments with statistically significant results. Separating pre-printed ruling lines from user-added handwriting shows how ruling lines impact people\u27s handwriting and how they can be exploited for identifying writers. Ruling line detection based on multi-line linear regression reduces the mean error of counting them from 0.10 to 0.03, 6.70 to 0.06, and 0.13 to 0.02, com- pared to an HMM-based approach on three standard test datasets, thereby reducing human correction time by 50%, 83%, and 72% on average. On 61 page images from 16 rule-form templates, the precision and recall of form cell recognition are increased by 2.7% and 3.7%, compared to a cross-matrix approach. Compensating for and exploiting ruling lines during feature extraction rather than pre-processing raises the writer identification accuracy from 61.2% to 67.7% on a 61-writer noisy Arabic dataset. Similarly, counteracting page-wise skew by subtracting it or transforming contours in a continuous coordinate system during feature extraction improves the writer identification accuracy. An implementation study of contour-hinge features reveals that utilizing the full probabilistic probability distribution function matrix improves the writer identification accuracy from 74.9% to 79.5%

An Alternative Approach to Second Language Teaching

Language, as a universal human trait, is so second-nature to mankind, that its subtleties in interaction have often been taken as a matter of course. Deeply ingrained folklore about language has existed from the days of the ancients and persists into so-called ‘rational’ modern civilization. The affect associated with language and its role in distinguishing in- and out- groups can be annotated by historical reference; for example, the ancient Greeks used the word ‘baba’ to describe the babblings of those unfortunates not gifted with the gods’ own Greek tongue - hence the origin of the word ‘barbarian’. The supposed magical qualities of words, in spells and incantations, are thoroughly documented in anthropological studies. Today, we find numerous examples of the affect attached to words language wars, name-calling, the informal definition of a cultured person as one who can converse in a foreign language, etc. These illustrations merely point out the complex and often under-the-surface relationship between language and other phases of human activity. Research on language has not been confined to the sphere of any one discipline. One can be led into a myriad of viewpoints within the traditional disciplines and of course, philosophy. This paper tends to be somewhat eclectic in its orientation toward language, as often the approach of one discipline proves to inadequate in insight or restrictive in treatment

An Alternative Approach to Second Language Teaching

Language, as a universal human trait, is so second-nature to mankind, that its subtleties in interaction have often been taken as a matter of course. Deeply ingrained folklore about language has existed from the days of the ancients and persists into so-called ‘rational’ modern civilization. The affect associated with language and its role in distinguishing in- and out- groups can be annotated by historical reference; for example, the ancient Greeks used the word ‘baba’ to describe the babblings of those unfortunates not gifted with the gods’ own Greek tongue - hence the origin of the word ‘barbarian’. The supposed magical qualities of words, in spells and incantations, are thoroughly documented in anthropological studies. Today, we find numerous examples of the affect attached to words language wars, name-calling, the informal definition of a cultured person as one who can converse in a foreign language, etc. These illustrations merely point out the complex and often under-the-surface relationship between language and other phases of human activity. Research on language has not been confined to the sphere of any one discipline. One can be led into a myriad of viewpoints within the traditional disciplines and of course, philosophy. This paper tends to be somewhat eclectic in its orientation toward language, as often the approach of one discipline proves to inadequate in insight or restrictive in treatment