Role of structure and component in judgments of visual similarity of Chinese characters.

Full Abstract

Skilled readers of Chinese participated in sorting and visual search experiments. The sorting results showed that under conditions of conflicting information about structure and component, subjective judgments of the visual similarity among characters were based on the characters' overall configurations (i.e., structures) rather than on the common components the characters possessed. In visual search, both structure and component contributed to the visual similarity reflected by the search efficiency. The steepest search slopes (thus the most similar target-distractor pairs) were found when the target and the distractor characters had the same structure and shared 1 common component, compared with when they had different structures and/or shared no common components. Results demonstrated that character structure plays a greater role in the visual similarity of Chinese characters than has been considered.

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Author information

Author/s: Yeh, Su-Ling (SL); Li, Jing-Ling (JL);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taipei. suling(-atsign-)ccms.ntu.edu.tw

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance (J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2002-Aug; vol 28 (issue 4) : pp 933-47

Dates: Created 2002/08/22; Completed 2003/01/30; Revised 2006/11/15;

PMID: 12190259, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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