The role of orthographic units and positional consistency in L2 Chinese character writing: Insights from online handwriting tasks

This study employed online handwriting tasks to examine two key components of Chinese orthographic knowledge―a repertoire of orthographic units of different grain sizes and the positional consistency of orthographic units―as well as the relationship between character writing and character knowledge. Fifty adult Korean learners of Chinese as a second language (L2) completed two Chinese character copying tasks—one with real characters and one with pseudo-characters—and a character naming task. Analyses of inter-stroke intervals (ISIs) in the real character copying task revealed a significant boundary effect, with longer pauses occurring between orthographic units than within them, indicating L2 learners’ tendency to chunk characters into functional units during writing. Shorter ISIs for phonetically regular characters demonstrated the potential influence of phonetic regularity on handwriting. Notably, participants showed higher accuracy when copying pseudo-characters containing components with high positional consistency after controlling for HSK levels. Error analyses further evidenced that their copying was modulated by the positional consistency of orthographic units. Overall, these findings suggest that multiple domains of orthographic knowledge, including awareness of unit grain sizes and their positional consistency, are important for L2 Chinese learning.