ERP evidence for asymmetric orthographic transfer between traditional and simplified Chinese

Xie, Jiushu; Huang, Yanli; Chen, Ke; Lin, Qian; Zhang, John X; Mo, Lei

doi:10.1007/s00221-020-05976-8

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

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“…As such, it is believed that a better explanation will need to consider the skills of the Chinese readers and the processing demands of recognising Chinese words in the two scripts. Specifically, as reviewed in the introduction, it is relatively well established that the processing demands of simplified Chinese characters lead the simplified Chinese users to develop better visual-perceptual skills (Liu et al, 2016;McBride-Chang et al, 2005;Xie et al, 2021). In other words, they may be able to differentiate visually simple and complex words more efficiently.…”

Section: Word Recognition In Simplified and Traditional Chinesementioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, the superior sensitivity to visual features in processing simplified characters has indeed been observed among proficient adult participants as well. For example, adopting a categorical perception paradigm, Yang and Wang (2018) showed that, as compared with proficient traditional Chinese users (i.e., university students), the simplified Chinese users displayed a sharper category boundary and superior discrimination performance across the category boundary for pairs of characters like “申” and “甲.” Other studies examined the transfer of perceptual expertise in reading the less familiar script (Liu et al, 2016, 2018; Xie et al, 2021), which consistently found that adult simplified Chinese users had higher expertise on character processing and they were better able to transfer their skill to reading traditional characters. In contrast, there was less transfer to reading simplified characters by the traditional Chinese users.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Comparing word recognition in simplified and traditional Chinese: A megastudy approach

Tsang

Huang

Wang

et al. 2023

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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While it is well-established that the visual complexity of a written word can influence processing, it is far less clear from a cross-script perspective, whether the overall visual complexity of the entire written lexicon also affects word recognition. This question can be answered with the data in megastudy of lexical decision in Chinese (MELD-CH), which was developed with over 800 participants responding to 12,587 simplified and traditional Chinese words. The results showed that lexical decision was slower but more accurate in simplified Chinese, which has about 22.5% less strokes, than traditional Chinese. This pattern could not be explained by a speed-accuracy trade-off. Moderate correlations were found in response times and error rates between the two scripts, indicating considerable overlap in processing despite the script difference. In addition, (generalized) linear mixed-effects modelling was used to examine whether the simplified and traditional Chinese groups differed in sensitivity towards linguistic variables. The results showed that the effects of word frequency, word length, and number of strokes were stronger in recognizing simplified Chinese words, while the effects of number of words formed and number of meanings of the constituent characters were stronger in traditional Chinese. These results suggested that the visual-perceptual processing demands of simplified Chinese might force readers to focus more on local properties of the words, making them less sensitive to global properties that are defined over the entire lexicon. Finally, limitations and alternative explanations of the results were discussed.

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Section: Word Recognition In Simplified and Traditional Chinesementioning

confidence: 99%