| Researches on recognition of Chinese character have become a hot topic in the field of cognitive psychology nowadays, and researchers have built several models to explain the process of character identification. According to Zhang's (2001) study, the kinds of theoretical perspectives were as following: (1) Gestalt theorists thought that the recognition was a top-down processing, and the basic unit of recognition was the whole character; (2) Feature Analysis theory orientation held that recognition was a bottom-up processing and the parts play an important role in the identification. (3) In the interaction perceptive, recognition of Chinese character was considered to be an interaction between top-down and bottom-up processing. But there was no conclusion which one was completely correct. Recently a series of studies on the transposed-letter effect have found that words with transposed-letter could also be recognizable, and letter's transposed positions influenced word recognition heavily. These discoveries inspired the Chinese character study, through exploring the influence of stroke deletion on reading, we could verify the current model of character recognition.In the previous study, restoring method was used to explore the effect on recognition of the characters with deleted strokes. Eye tracking method was used in current study to investigate the fragmentary characters' influence on the reading Chinese sentences which consisted of characters with different styles and levels of characters stroke deletion. The results showed that characters with the beginning strokes deletion were the most disruptive to the reading, characters with the ending strokes deletion were less disruptive than characters with the beginning strokes deletion, and the characters with configuration keeping deletion were the least disruptive. According to all the eye movement measures, the characters with 50% deletion were the most costly, the characters with 30% deletion take the second place, but the characters with 15% deletion didn't have influence on the way of reading. After that, the conditions were changed in experiment 2, and the results also indicated when percentage of the stroke deletion was 15%, the effect on reading was minimal, 30% was more disruptive, and the 50% deletion was the most disruptive; characters with the ending strokes deletion were less disruptive than characters with the beginning strokes deletion.The findings showed that: (1) the multi-level and double-way processing model of Gestalt could explain the Chinese character recognition better than other theories, and both the top-down and bottom-up processing coexisted in Chinese character recognition, however the top-down processing played a dominant role; (2) The more strokes were removed, the harder the readers could recognize the characters; (3) Compared with other parts of strokes in a character, the beginning strokes were more significant in the character identification. |
