中華心理學刊 民 88，41 卷，1 期，65-85
Chinese Journal of Psychology 1999, Vol.41, No.1, 65-85

Su-Ling Yeh（Department of Psychology National Taiwan University）；Jing-Ling Li（Department of Psychology National Taiwan University）；Kuang-Ming Chen（Department of Psychology National Taiwan University）

Abstract

To verify the classification system of the shapes of Chinese characters identified by Yeh, Li. and Chen (1997) this study was designed to avoid the two possible shortcomings in the previous study. Twelve predesignated categories of characters adopted from Liu (1984) were selected to cover a larger spectrum of Chinese characters. In addition. the set size in each category was varied to prevent subjects' guessing as might have been caused by the regularity of the constant set size. As with the previous study. the subjects were asked to group Chinese characters according to the degree of similarities in their shapes. Hierachical cluster analysis and nonmetric multidimensional scaling were conducted and the results were consistent with the original report by Yeh et al.. Horizontal, L-shaped. 厂-shaped. vertical and enclosed characters formed 5 major clusters. Horizontal-vertical, open-enclosed, and square-nonsquare were identified as the 3 axes in the character space.

Keywords：Chinese character, Classification, Multidimensional scaling, cluster analysis, Similarity, shape