Phonological and Logographic Influences on Errors in Written Chinese Words

We analyze a collection of 3208 reported errors of Chinese words. Among these errors, 7.2% involved rarely used character, and 98.4% were assigned common classifications of their causes by human subjects. In particular, 80% of the errors observed in the writings of middle school students were related to the pronunciations and 30% were related to the logographs of the words. We conducted experiments that shed light on using the Web-based statistics to correct the errors, and we designed a software environment for preparing test items whose authors intentionally replace correct characters with wrong ones. Experimental results show that using Web-based statistics can help us correct only about 75% of these errors. In contrast, Web-based statistics are useful for recommending incorrect characters for composing test items for “incorrect character identification” tests about 93% of the time.