An Empirical Study on the Relationship between Chinese Character Recognition and Production

This study investigated the relationship between Chinese character recognition and production by second language (L2) learners. A panel study, which employed an instrument consisting of a character recognition task and a production task, was adopted. Subjects were 47 first‐year Chinese language students in the U.S. There were three major findings in this study: (a) Although the correlations between character recognition and production for both Time 1 (T1) and Time 2 (T2) were moderate, it appeared that there was a decrease of correlation for T2; (b) Students performed better in the recognition tasks than in the production tasks; (c) Students performed better with low density characters than high density characters in the production tasks. Direction for future research to complement the findings of the current study is also suggested.