Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Typing Chinese words on a computer can be carried out with a phonology-based or an orthography-based method.Phonological typing constantly engages typists’ verbal working memory (VWM), while orthographic typing engages theirvisual-spatial working memory (VSWM). Accordingly, habitual phonological typists would develop a better VWM capacity,while habitual orthographic typists would have a better VSWM capacity. Five VWM tests and five VSWM tests were adminis-tered to 24 phonological typists and 23 orthographic typists. The results showed that the phonological typists scored higher thanthe orthographic typists on the VWM tests, but no significant differences on the VSWM scores were observed. The latter resultis attributed to the notoriously abundance of homophones in Chinese, which forces the phonological typists to keep attending tothe orthographic forms of the characters being typed. Our findings suggest that individual cognitive systems develop and adaptflexibly, subject to shaping by technology within a life’s time.