Empirical Evidence and the Typology of Writing Systems: A Response to Handel

A writing system capable of transcribing any utterance in its associated language necessarily combines phonographic and logographic techniques, and therefore invokes both phonological recoding and the identification of whole words or morphemes. The idea that Chinese writing is uniquely and exceptionally logographic arises from a failure to recognize the logographic features of alphabetic and other so-called “phonetic” writing systems as well as real-life instances of extreme phonography and logography. DeFrancis (1984, 1989) maintained this view in part because of contem-porary studies (e.g. Horodeck 1987) showing that phonological recoding usually precedes lexical identification in the reading of Chinese characters. More recent results, based on a variety of advanced experimental methods (e.g. Dehaene 2009, Dehaene & Cohen 2011) strongly support DeFrancis’s position. It is time to abandon the fiction that people learn and use writing systems based on Chinese characters in ways fundamentally different from those people use to learn and use all other writing systems. The causes of cultural differences that distinguish East Asia from other parts of the world are to be found in differences in history, education, social organization, economics, and politics, not in psycholinguistics.