Stroke encoding in simplified and traditional Chinese character processing: An eye-tracking experiment

One of the distinctive characteristics of the Chinese language is that it has two concurrent orthographies: traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese. About 30% of the simplified characters are a reduction in the number of strokes or structural complexity from traditional Chinese characters. Hence, the two orthographies are different in many important aspects including the number of strokes. Since traditional Chinese character contains more strokes than the simplified one, it is possible that it also has more redundant strokes. Therefore, the stroke encoding in character recognition might be different between traditional characters and simplified ones. The present study was conducted to examine whether traditional and simplified Chinese readers differed in stroke encoding in character processing by using the stroke removal paradigm. In the eye-tracking experiment, participants were required to read sentences comprised of characters with different proportions and types of strokes removed in order to explore whether strokes would play different roles in processing simplified and traditional characters. Results revealed that simplified Chinese readers used configuration information more efficiently for lexical access than traditional Chinese readers. Moreover, the beginning strokes were more influential than ending strokes and this difference was more salient for traditional Chinese readers than for simplified Chinese readers.