Character Amnesia: A Sociolinguistic Study on the Different Effects in the Decline of Handwriting Literacy of Chinese Characters

Abstract

In the past few years, researchers have begun to empirically study character amnesia, finally providing trial-tested answers for the phenomenon and relieving many from the reliance on anecdotal evidence, which was previously the only kind available. The recent studies, however, have all focused on variables in relation to character amnesia on the lexical level with little attention paid to the participants themselves. The current study presents a first-of-its-kind empirical investigation of the effects of sociolinguistic variables and the degree to which they predict character amnesia in L1 Chinese speakers of varying ages living in the Pacific Northwestern United States. Using a dictation task, the study had 84 participants handwrite a range of 24 to 106 Chinese characters. The results showed that length of residency in the US, age, gender, and input method editor (IME) preference are among the most important predictors of character amnesia. Key behavioral variables that were assumed to yield significant results, such as handwriting frequency and keyboarding frequency, showed no significance in the data set prompting suspicion. These variables will require deeper exploration in future studies to verify their non-significance in predicting character amnesia in individuals.