This article provides a comparative evaluation of Chinese character reform in the People's Republic of China and Japan, with a particular focus on the latest changes announced in 2009 to the existing script policies in the two countries. The first Chinese script reform took place in 1956 and the first Japanese script reform in 1946, both for the…

Three different visual skills, along with Chinese character recognition, vocabulary, speeded naming, and syllable deletion skills were tested twice over one school year among 118 Hong Kong and 96 Xiangtan, China kindergartners. Results revealed that a task of Visual Spatial Relationships [Gardner, M. F. (1996). "Test of visual-perceptual…

Two articles discuss Chinese libraries and materials: one reviews the role of bibliographic utilities in the bibliographic control of Chinese language materials in U.S. libraries, and one examines characteristics of administration in academic libraries in China from both historical perspective and current practice. (64 references) (LRW)

Results of a study of children's performance on pseudohomophone naming, similarity judgment, and lexical decision suggest that training in pinyin, a system for spelling Chinese words in Latin letters, helps child readers pronounce unfamiliar words, and makes them more responsive to visual information but less precise in word recognition.…