中華心理學刊
民89，42卷，2期，191-216

SU-LING YEH（Department of Psycholog National Taiwan Universit）

Abstract

Three visual search experiments were conducted to examine the effect of the configurational structures of Chinese character on search efficiency. In Experiment 1, the subjects'task was to detect a different character among a homogeneous set of distracting characters presented in an imagery 5 x 5 grid The set size varied from trial to trial, and the reaction times were measured. The target and the distractors either shared the same structure or had different structures.The horizontal-vertical and open-enclosed structural dimensions that were revealed in the character space of Yeh, Li, and Chen (1997; 1999) were examined. In Experiment 2, the subject searched for a predesignated target character among a distracting field of constant density. Better controls of the familiarity of same-structured and different-structured trials and the range of character frequency were made to exclude the possible confounding variables in Experiment I. The results from both experiments showed that it was more efficient to detect a target character when its structure was different from that of the distractors than when their structures were the same. In Experiment 3 the five structure types explicitly specified in Yeh et al. (1999) were paired as the target and distractors. As the structures between these pairs were more similar. the search slopes were steeper. The search slopes thus were served as a diagnostic tool for the similarity of characters with various structures.Implications of these results were discussed in the text.

Keywords: Chinese character, Structure, Similarity, Visual search