Handwriting has been largely replaced by typing in modern days, leading to a decline in handwriting literacy (e.g., character amnesia), especially in non-alphabetic scripts such as Chinese. Making use of a recent large-scale handwriting database, the current study presents the first systematic empirical investigation of character amnesia in Chinese. We show that character amnesia occurs for about 42% of characters and about 6% of the time for university students. People experience more amnesia for characters that are less frequent, embedded in a less-familiar word, acquired later in life, with more strokes, less regular in spelling, or less imageable in their meaning. Among these, character frequency, context word familiarity and age of acquisition are the most influential predictors of character amnesia. We discuss these effects on character amnesia in comparison to word retrieval difficulties in handwriting in general and in speaking.

如今，手写已基本被替换为打字，导致手写素养（例如字符失忆症）下降，尤其是在非字母文字（如中文）中。利用最新的大规模手写数据库，当前的研究提出了第一个系统的中文字符遗忘症的系统经验研究。我们显示，字符失忆症发生在大约42％的字符中，大约6％的时间发生在大学生中。人们对于频率较低，嵌入到较不熟悉的单词中，生活较晚的单词，笔画较多，拼写较不规则或含义难以理解的字符遇到的健忘症更多。在这些因素中，字符频率，上下文单词的熟悉程度和获取的年龄是字符遗忘症最有影响力的预测因素。