Cite as:
Lo S, Yeh S-L, 2004, "Are Chinese characters picture-like?" Perception 33 ECVP Abstract Supplement

Are Chinese characters picture-like?

S Lo, S-L Yeh

We examined whether Chinese characters are like pictures in the sense that the form-meaning relationship is much closer than that in English, when using the repetition blindness (RB) paradigm. RB occurs when the second instance of a repeated item is undetected owing to the failure to create or stabilise the second spatiotemporal token for the same type. Previous studies found RB for semantically related pictures, but not when these items were presented as English words. Meaning thus seems necessary for picture identification, whereas word recognition proceeds too quickly on the basis of orthography for its meaning to exert any effect. On this basis, we examined whether Chinese characters are processed like pictures or like English words (Reeves and Harris, personal communication). If Chinese characters are like pictures, RB should be found when the two critical characters are synonyms. In four experiments, series of characters (or two-character words) and symbols were presented in rapid serial visual presentation, and participants were asked to write down or articulate the characters (or words). Robust RB was found for orthographically identical characters, but not for synonyms. This indicates that Chinese characters are processed more like English words than like pictures.

[Supported by the National Science Council of Taiwan, NSC92-2413-H-002-026.]

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