Difficult Characters, Interdisciplinary Studies of Chinese and Japanese Writing

Mary S. Erbaugh has compiled this volume to examine the so-called "ideographic myth from a variety of perspectives. Through this multidisciplinary collection of articles, we learn how the myth has come about, what sort of theory and empirical evidence have been generated to refute it, and how this myth has stubbornly persisted to hamper progress in a number of scholarly areas. But perhaps most importantly, this volume presents in a detailed manner how different academic disciplines go about analyzing historical and empirical data in order to arrive at new knowledge.

Mary S. Erbaugh studied Chinese psycholinguistics at University of California, Berkeley. Much of her work analyzes child and adult mental categories across languages. Her publications include "The Acquistion of Mandarin" in Dan I. Slobin's (ed.) The Cross-linguistic Study of Language Acquisition, volume 3 (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1992) and 'Classifiers are for specification: Complementary functions for sortal and general classifiers in Cantonese and Mandarin' in Cahiers de Linguistique - Asie Orientale (2002: 31).