Effectiveness of Different Pinyin Presentation Formats in Learning Chinese Characters: A Cognitive Load Perspective

 

In this article, Lee and Kalyuga demonstrate that pinyin of a two-character word is more effectively learned when it is presented directly under Chinese characters than next to them.

 

According to the cognitive load theory, working memory becomes overloaded if more than a few chunks of information are processed simultaneously. It further states that there are three types of cognitive loads: (1) The intrinsic cognitive load: the difficulty of the working material; (2) The extraneous cognitive load: wasteful cognitive load generated by the manner the material is presented; (3) Germane cognitive load: working memory resources that are related to schema acquisition and automation. It is suggested that the intrinsic load should be properly selected and the extraneous load minimized so that the germane load can be increased without overloading the working memory capacity.

In Chinese textbooks, pinyin is often placed in a vertical format either right above Chinese characters, or in a horizontal format next to the characters. According to the cognitive load theory, a split attention effect occurs when spatially separated sources of information have to be integrated mentally in order to be understood. This effect is also present when parts of pinyin have to be located to each character of a word; however, Lee and Kalyuga demonstrated that this effect can be reduced in a vertical format, which results in an higher instructional efficiency.

 

Lee, C. H., Kalyuga, S. (2011). Effectiveness of Different Pinyin Presentation Formats in Learning Chinese Characters: A Cognitive Load Perspective. Language Learning, 61(4), 1099-1118.