Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The purpose of the study was to examine whether knowledge of the prescribed stroke sequence matters for learning ofhandwriting of a new Chinese character. Twenty five junior primary school children participated in the study and wereasked to write 6 new characters; with 3 characters with stroke sequence instructions and 3 characters without instructionson a Wacom Intuos 5 digitizing writing tablet. Each character was repeated 40 times. Trajectory, speed, onpaper time,inair time, and number of changes in velocity direction per stroke (NCV) were measured. The results showed a significanttime effect (practice). The effect of stroke sequence instructions was also significant. With stroke instruction, childrenpresented faster speed, shorter on-paper time, shorter in-air time and shorter trajectory. But there was no effect of strokeinstruction on NCV. Further the results showed that some measures did not reach plateau even after 40 times of writing. Weinterpret the results as indicating that the knowledge of the stroke sequences is important for the learning of handwritingof Chinese characters. The results also imply that with continuing practice, stroke instruction may continue to improvehandwriting.