Phonetic and semantic radical priming in Chinese character amnesia

The shift from handwriting to digital typing as the dominant form of written communication has led to a decrease in handwriting proficiency. This trend is particularly evident in opaque writing systems, such as Chinese, where speakers increasingly experience "character amnesia," the inability to (fully) handwrite a character despite being able to recognize it. In this study, we investigated whether prior exposure to a phonetic or semantic radical of a character helps to subsequently alleviate amnesia in handwriting the character. In three online experiments, participants were first exposed to a prime character that shares a phonetic radical, a semantic radical, or no radical with a target character (or, in Experiment 2, exposed to a stand-alone radical); then they handwrote the target character according to a dictation prompt. Participants reported less character amnesia in handwriting the target character if they had previously been exposed to a phonetic or semantic radical, either as part of a prime character or as a stand-alone radical. Furthermore, the priming effect of the semantic radical was similar regardless of whether the prime had a transparent semantic radical or nontransparent semantic radical. These findings suggest that a potential cause of character amnesia in Chinese is incomplete orthographic activation in radicals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).