Role of Structure and Component in Judgments of Visual Similarity of Chinese Characters

Abstract

Skilled readers of Chinese participated in sorting & visual search experiments. The sorting results showed that under conditions of conflicting information about structure & component, subjective judgments of the visual similarity among characters were based on the characters’ overall configurations (i.e., structures) rather than on the common components the characters possessed. In visual search, both structure & component contributed to the visual similarity reflected by the search efficiency. The steepest search slopes (thus the most similar target– distractor pairs) were found when the target & the distractor characters had the same structure & shared 1 common component, compared with when they had different structures and/or shared no common components. Results demonstrated that character structure plays a greater role in the visual similarity of Chinese characters than has been considered.