The perception of simplified and traditional Chinese characters in the eye of simplified and traditional Chinese readers

Accepted as a talkExpertise in Chinese character recognition is marked by analytic/reduced holistic processing (Hsiao & Cottrell, 2009), which depends mainly on readers’ writing rather than reading experience (Tso, Au, & Hsiao, 2011). Here we examined whether simplified and traditional Chinese readers process characters differently in terms of holistic processing. When processing characters that are distinctive in the simplified and traditional scripts, we found that simplified Chinese readers were more analytic than traditional Chinese readers in perceiving simplified characters; this effect depended on their writing rather than reading/copying performance. In contrast, the two groups did not differ in holistic processing of traditional characters, regardless of their performance difference in writing/reading traditional characters. When processing characters that are shared in the two scripts, simplified Chinese readers were also more analytic than traditional Chinese readers. These results suggest that simplified Chinese readers may have developed better analytic processing skills than traditional Chinese readers from experiences with simplified characters, and these skills are transferrable to the processing of shared and even traditional characters.link_to_OA_fulltextThe 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci2012), Sapporo, Japan, 1-4 August 2012. In CogSci 2012 Proceedings, 2012, p. 689-69

The perception of simplified and traditional Chinese Characters in the eye of simplified and traditional Chinese readers

This journal issue contains meeting abstracts presented at VSS 2012Open Access JournalChinese character expertise involves reduced holistic processing and left side bias/right hemisphere lateralization (Hsiao & Cottrell, 2009). Tso, Au, and Hsiao (2011) recently showed that the reduction in holistic processing was due to writing rather than reading experience; in contrast, the left side bias depended on perceptual experience but not writing experience. Here we examined …link_to_OA_fulltextThe 12th Annual Meeting of the Vision Sciences Society (VSS 2012), Naples, FL., 11-16 May 2012. In Journal of Vision, 2012, v. 12 n. 9, p. 53