Acta Psychologica Sinica

Abstract

The strokes are the least structural units of Chinese characters. Since the emergence of cognitive psychology, a lot of researches have been done to explore the role of the strokes in the cognition of Chinese characters. Many studies showed that there was the stroke number effect in the processing of Chinese characters. But there are still debates about the role of the strokes in the cognition of Chinese characters. Some researchers believed that the strokes are not good measure indexes of the features of Chinese characters because the strokes are different in complexity. Using the methods of stroke recognition and lexical decision, two experiments were conducted to inspect the complexity effect of the strokes in the perception of strokes and the stroke repetition effect in cognition of the Chinese characters. Experiment 1 explored the complexity effect of the strokes in perception of the strokes. The results showed that there was not complexity effect in perception of the strokes, and not marked differences between the time of spotting simple strokes and that of sporting complex strokes. Experiment 2 explored the repetition effect of the strokes in the cognition of the Chinese characters. The results indicated that there was repetition effect of the strokes in the cognition of the Chinese characters. The high-repeated-stroke Chinese characters were recognized faster and with lower error rate than the low-repeated-stroke Chinese characters. The whole results supported the hypothesis that the strokes of the Chinese characters are basic units in the processing of the Chinese characters.

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