Non-monotonic developmental trend of holistic processing in visual expertise: the case of Chinese character recognition

Abstract

Holistic processing has been identified as an expertise marker of face and object recognition. By contrast, reduced holistic processing is purportedly an expertise marker in recognising orthographic characters in Chinese. Does holistic processing increase or decrease in expertise development? Is orthographic recognition a domain-specific exception to all other kinds of recognition (e.g. face and objects)? In two studies, we examined the developmental trend of holistic processing in Chinese character recognition in Chinese and non-Chinese children, and its relationship with literacy abilities: Chinese first graders-with emergent Chinese literacy acquired in kindergarten-showed increased holistic processing perhaps as an inchoate expertise marker when compared with kindergartners and non-Chinese first graders; however, the holistic processing effect was reduced in higher-grade Chinese children. These results suggest a non-monotonic inverted U-shape trend of holistic processing in visual expertise development: An increase in holistic processing due to initial reading experience followed by a decrease in holistic processing due to literacy enhancement. This result marks the development of holistic and analytic processing skills, both of which can be essential for mastering visual recognition. This study is the first to investigate the developmental trend of holistic processing in Chinese character recognition using the composite paradigm.

Keywords: Holistic processing; Reading; Visual expertise; Word recognition; Writing.

Fig. 1

Complete composite paradigm to measure holistic processing for face stimuli. In each trial, participants were cued to attend to the top or bottom half of each stimulus pair and judged whether the attended halves were the same or different (attended halves encircled by the red rectangles in the figure). Holistic processing was demonstrated by a lower performance level in the incongruent condition than in the congruent condition, induced by the interference of the irrelevant/unattended halves

Fig. 2

Examples of Chinese characters with a left–right configuration (left) and a top–bottom configuration (right)

Fig. 3

Illustration of stimulus pairs in the complete composite paradigm and trial sequences. In (a), it shows the four conditions used in the paradigm; the attended components are shaded in grey. In (b), a 1000 ms central fixation cross precedes each trial, followed by a cue either below or above the cross, or to the left or right of the cross, to indicate which halves (top or bottom/left or right) of the characters participants should attend to in the subsequent display. The complete composite paradigm (Gauthier & Bukach, 2007) was adopted so that in congruent trials, the attended and irrelevant/unattended halves corresponded to the same response (i.e. both were the same or both were different); by contrast, in incongruent trials, the attended and irrelevant/unattended halves would correspond to different judgments (e.g. the top halves were the same, while the bottom halves were different). We adopted this paradigm to avoid response biases that may occur in the partial composite design where the irrelevant/unattended halves are always different (Richler et al., 2011; Robbins & McKone, 2007)

Fig. 4

A′ of congruent and incongruent trials in the holistic processing task (left) and Holistic A′ in Chinese first graders, third graders, fifth graders and kindergartners (right)

Fig. 5

A′ of congruent and incongruent trials (left) and Holistic A′ in for non-Chinese-speaking first, third and fifth graders in the holistic processing task (right)

Fig. 6

Holistic A′ in Chinese first graders, third graders, fifth graders and NCS first graders