Journal Paper Published

Abstract

Handwriting is a fundamental skill for children at school, playing a critical role in exams, tests, and everyday classroom activities. It has long been integral to education across generations and cultures. Writing by hand also supports cognitive processes such as letter and word retention (e.g., Bara & Gentaz, 2011; James & Engelhardt, 2012). An estimated 7 to 15% of school-age children experience developmental dysgraphia,1 a specific learning disorder characterised by persistent difficulties with handwriting acquisition despite normal intelligence and sufficient learning opportunities (American Psychiatric Association, issuing body, 2022; McCloskey & Rapp, 2017). However, the theoretical framework for developmental dysgraphia remains underdeveloped, particularly for Chinese, a logographic script known for its visual complexity and opaque phonology-orthography mapping. In this paper, we first outline the cognitive mechanisms underlying Chinese character handwriting in adults, then present evidence for the continual development theory (Castles et al., 2014) over the stage-based theory (Ehri, 2005), showing that adult-derived handwriting models can inform our understanding of children's handwriting processes. We then systematically examine the behavioural syndromes and brain regions in five types of dysgraphia: surface dysgraphia, phonological dysgraphia, deep dysgraphia, graphemic buffer dysgraphia, and motor-spatial dysgraphia, and discuss the relationship between dyslexia and dysgraphia. Finally, we review the current assessment methods and propose new approaches for assessing different types of dysgraphia in Chinese.