Abstract
Our previous studies (Yeh, Li, & Chen, 1997, 1999; Yeh & Li, 2002) showed that skilled readers of Chinese used the overall structure of the character in their judgments of visual similarity in Chinese characters. The purpose of this study was to further examine the perception of Chinese characters for children in elementary school, especially, the role of structure in their judgments of visual similarity of Chinese characters. School children of grade 1, 3, and 5 conducted a sorting task based on the similarity in the visual form of Chinese characters. The results of cluster analysis showed a perceptual trend from local features/strokes to more globally defined patterns (such as components and structures) with the increase of age and the number of characters these children possessed. Different from the previous results obtained from kindergartners and college students, children in elementary school had a higher tendency to sort characters based on similar components and the relationship between components, and they seemed unable to avoid the involvement of semantics in the shape-sorting task. As age and vocabulary knowledge increase, the tendency of extracting the character structure and using it in the shape-sorting task increases.
| Keywords: | Chinese character; grapheme; structure; component; radical |
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