Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Expert face recognition has been marked by holistic processingand left-side bias/right hemisphere involvement. Hencerecognition for Chinese characters, sharing many visualperceptual properties with face perception, was thought toinduce stronger holistic processing and left-side bias effect.However, Hsiao & Cottrell (2009) showed that expertise inChinese character recognition involved reduced holisticprocessing, while Tso, Au & Hsiao (2014) suggested this effectmay be modulated by writing experiences; in contrast, left-sidebias was found to be a consistent expertise marker regardlessof writing experiences. Here we examine holistic processingand left-side bias effect of Chinese character recognitionbetween adolescents with and without dyslexia. Students withdyslexia were found to recognize Chinese characters with astronger holistic processing effect than the typical controls.However, compared with the controls, dyslexics showed amore reduced left-side bias in processing mirror-symmetricChinese characters. The theoretical and educationalimplications of these results were discussed.