The Dual-route Account of Writing-to-Dictation in Chinese: A Short Report

This is a short report of an experiment conducted to investigate the effects of phonology-to-orthography (P-O) consistency, lexical frequency, imageability, and the number of strokes on writing-to-dictation in Chinese. Thirty-two undergraduates were tested using a writing-to-dictation task consisting of 60 Chinese characters without homophones (i.e., P-O consistent) and 60 Chinese characters with at least two homophones (i.e., P-O inconsistent), the responses of which were recorded on an Android tablet. Linear mixed-effect modelling was used to investigate the significance of the different effects on three measures-accuracy, response time (RT), and total writing time. The results indicated that imageability was significant in predicting accuracy and RT; P-O consistency was significant in predicting RT and total writing time; the number of strokes was significant in predicting accuracy and total writing time; and the lexical frequency effect was significant in predicting all three measures. In general, the results supported the dual-route account of writing-to-dictation in Chinese and confirmed that both the lexical-semantic and lexical non-semantic pathways are needed to explain writing-to-dictation in Chinese. The significance of the different effects observed in the three measures also indicated the need to include different measures when studying writing-to-dictation to better understand the time course of the writing process.