A 30-item Test for Assessing Chinese Character Amnesia in Child Handwriters

TL;DR

This paper introduces a reliable, efficient 30-item assessment tool for detecting Chinese character amnesia in children, aiding early identification of handwriting and literacy difficulties in the digital age.

Contribution

The study develops and validates a novel, standardized diagnostic test for Chinese character amnesia using item response theory and large-scale handwriting data.

Findings

The 30-item test maintains high correlation with full dataset (r=0.93).

The upper-and-lower-thirds discrimination scheme optimizes test efficiency.

The tool can identify early handwriting and orthographic learning difficulties.

Abstract

Handwriting literacy is an important skill for learning and communication in school-age children. In the digital age, handwriting has been largely replaced by typing, leading to a decline in handwriting proficiency, particularly in non-alphabetic writing systems. Among children learning Chinese, a growing number have reported experiencing character amnesia: difficulty in correctly handwriting a character despite being able to recognize it. Given that there is currently no standardized diagnostic tool for assessing character amnesia in children, we developed an assessment to measure Chinese character amnesia in Mandarin-speaking school-age population. We utilised a large-scale handwriting dataset in which 40 children handwrote 800 characters from dictation prompts. Character amnesia and correct handwriting responses were analysed using a two-parameter Item Response Theory model. Four item-selection schemes were compared: random baseline, maximum discrimination, diverse difficulty, and an upper-and-lower-thirds discrimination score. Candidate item subsets were evaluated using out-of-sample prediction. Among these selection schemes, the upper-and-lower-thirds discrimination procedure yields a compact 30-item test that preserves individual-difference structure and generalizes to unseen test-takers (cross-validated mean r =.74 with full 800-item-test; within-sample r =.93). This short-form test provides a reliable and efficient tool of assessing Chinese character amnesia in children and can be used to identify early handwriting and orthographic learning difficulties, contributing to the early detection of developmental dysgraphia and related literacy challenges.