中  華  心  理  學  刊
民92，45卷，1期，47-74

Wen-chi Chiang（Department of Psychology, National Chung-Cheng University）

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the basic orthographic units used by the fifth graders in character recognition: Experiment 1 used a simultaneous ‘same-different’ comparison task; Experiment 2 used a character-decision task. The current study modeled after S. Chen and Liu's (2000) study with adults. The results of their study showed that simultaneous comparisons of pairs of Chinese characters were influenced by the stroke-patterns (SPs), not the individual strokes, that comprised the characters. That is, the larger was the number of SPs, the longer was the response latency; however, this pattern was restricted to the 'same' judgments for high-frequency character pairs. By contrast, in the ‘different’ judgments and in the character-decision task, the effect of stroke number was found instead, suggesting that the effect of SPs observed in the ‘same’ judgments might result from specific task-demands for making simultaneous comparisons. In the current study, children’s performance on the ‘same-different’ judgment task (Experiment 1) showed a pattern similar to the found in adults, but their performance on the character-decision task showed a different pattern (Experiment 2). The results of Experiment 2 showed that the child participant’s character decision responses to low-frequency characters were affected by the number of strokes, but a trend of the SP-number effect was also found although it was not robust – it was significant only in the subject, not in the item analysis. One explanation of these results was that the fifth graders flexible used either individual strokes or SPs in character recognition, depending on the testing context. However, a further inspection of the stimulus characters used in Experiment 2 suggested that the trend of SP-number effect might be apparent and resulted from mismatch in a character-based visual attribute, the visual-density distribution (as can be indicated by visual complexity of the character’s right-side radical), between the stimuli used for contrasting SP conditions. Post hoc analyses of the responses to a selected subset of stimuli (matched in the visual complexity of the characters’ right-side radical) revealed a pattern consistent with this proposal. The pattern of current results is thus more consistent with the view that individual strokes function as the basic orthographic units in children’s recognition of Chinese characters. Implications of the current findings are discussed with respect to the existing theoretical framework for, and to the development of, character recognition processes.

Keywords：Chinese character recognition, Orthographic units, Number of strokes, Stroke-patterns, Beginning reader