Do the Chinese and alphabetic writing systems require different skills?
dyslexia
Looking at the eye movement variables during naming Chinese characters in German and in Chinese, there was no significant difference between the two groups regarding articulation latency, numbers of fixations and fixation duration. This suggests that children with dyslexia may process the Chinese characters in a way that is similar to the way members of the control group do it when focusing on their meaning. The similar eye movement pattern found in this study may be based on a shared logographic/visual phase at the beginning of learning the semantics of Chinese characters, as described by Yang [The method of learning a language, i.e. whether a word is processed visually as a whole, or as grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, involves different neural networks, which has been previously studied by introducing an artificial language [Studies of deficits of the visual attention span (VAS) have shown a correlation with dyslexia, although this is still a matter of debate. Recent research suggests that the VAS affects reading ability and fluency in Chinese [Conversely, reading alphabetic languages requires mapping a sound to a letter string in an analytic manner, and a weakness in this skill is generally accepted as the main cause of dyslexia in alphabetic scripts. This is supported by our present study. In Chinese readers, visual-orthographic knowledge and especially morphological awareness are important for successful reading [There are reports on children with dyslexia who show reading problems only in one writing system and not in the other: In contrast to English, poor Chinese readers exhibited poor performance in copying Chinese characters, which plays an important role for Chinese literacy skills [