M. Martin Taylor

Writing and literacy in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese

This edition has been replaced by a new edition and is no longer available for purchase. Chinese, Japanese, South (and North) Koreans in East Asia have a long, intertwined and distinguished cultural history and have achieved, or are in the process of achieving, spectacular economic success. Together, these three peoples make up one quarter of the world population. They use a variety of unique and fascinating writing systems: logographic Chinese characters of ancient origin, as well as phonetic systems of syllabaries and alphabets. The book describes, often in comparison with English, how the Chinese, Korean and Japanese writing systems originated and developed; how each relates to its spoken language; how it is learned or taught; how it can be computerized; and how it relates to the past and present literacy, education, and culture of its users. Intimately familiar with the three East Asian cultures, Insup Taylor with the assistance of Martin Taylor, has written an accessible and highly readable book. Writing and Literacy in Chinese, Korean and Japanese is intended for academic readers (students in East Asian Studies, linguistics, education, psychology) as well as for the general public (parents, business, government). Readers of the book will learn about the interrelated cultural histories of China, Korea and Japan, but mainly about the various writing systems, some exotic, some familar, some simple, some complex, but all fascinating.

The Structure of Multimodal Dialogue

That the terms “dialogue” (e.g., between humans) and “interaction” (e.g., between user and computer) can be used interchangeably is implicitly assumed throughout this collection of papers edited by Taylor, Néel, and Bouwhuis. That a dialogue typically involves the use of multiple “modes” of communication and that it has its own internal structure are of obvious import to those who work in application domains that require the collaboration of human users either with software systems or with one another through the use of mediating software systems. This collection, therefore, will be of interest to researchers who want to know about early attempts to apply the metaphor of multimodal human-human communication to collaborative domains such as these. This volume is a long-delayed follow-up publication from a workshop held under the same title in Aquafredda di Maratea, Italy, in 1991. The material in this volume is clearly not recent—the editors report that the authors were requested to bring the papers up to date, but since practically all of the works referenced by the papers in this volume predate 1994, it seems that their request was not made in the years prior to publication. This is also reflected in the absence of the notion of a communicative agent (although, due to its now-rampant overuse, some might welcome this) and the lack of reference to the work on embodied agents that emerged in the last decade and is clearly relevant (for exam-

Writing and Literacy in Chinese, Korean and Japanese: Revised edition

The book describes how the three East Asian writing systems-Chinese, Korean, and Japanese- originated, developed, and are used today. Uniquely, this book: (1) examines the three East Asian scripts (and English) together in relation to each other, and (2) discusses how these scripts are, and historically have been, used in literacy and how they are learned, written, read, and processed by the eyes, the brain, and the mind. In this second edition, the authors have included recent research findings on the uses of the scripts, added several new sections, and rewritten several other sections. They have also added a new Part IV to deal with issues that similarly involve all the four languages/scripts of their interest. The book is intended both for the general public and for interested scholars. Technical terms (listed in a glossary) are used only when absolutely necessary.

The Structure of Multimodal Dialogue II

That the terms “dialogue” (e.g., between humans) and “interaction” (e.g., between user and computer) can be used interchangeably is implicitly assumed throughout this collection of papers edited by Taylor, Néel, and Bouwhuis. That a dialogue typically involves the use of multiple “modes” of communication and that it has its own internal structure are of obvious import to those who work in application domains that require the collaboration of human users either with software systems or with one another through the use of mediating software systems. This collection, therefore, will be of interest to researchers who want to know about early attempts to apply the metaphor of multimodal human-human communication to collaborative domains such as these. This volume is a long-delayed follow-up publication from a workshop held under the same title in Aquafredda di Maratea, Italy, in 1991. The material in this volume is clearly not recent—the editors report that the authors were requested to bring the papers up to date, but since practically all of the works referenced by the papers in this volume predate 1994, it seems that their request was not made in the years prior to publication. This is also reflected in the absence of the notion of a communicative agent (although, due to its now-rampant overuse, some might welcome this) and the lack of reference to the work on embodied agents that emerged in the last decade and is clearly relevant (for exam-