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

Abstract

Expertise in Chinese character recognition is marked by analytic/reduced holistic processing, 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 in perceiving simplified characters, which was dependent on their simplified Chinese writing 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. These results suggest that simplified Chinese readers may have developed better analytic processing skills from experiences with simplified characters, and these skills are transferable to the processing of shared and even traditional characters.


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