Composite effect in Chinese character holistic recognition

Abstract

Holistic processing, roughly defined as the obligatory attention to all parts of an object, has been established as a key feature of human cognition among our recognition of faces, but studies in the past two decades have also attempted to explore whether such processing is also present among other domains, with one of the crucial branches be the recognition of visual words. Some previous literatures have adopted the composite paradigm originated from face recognition tasks and found holistic processing is also present among the recognition of words in alphabetic languages such as English or Portuguese. However in terms of Chinese, which is a logographic language orthographically differing from alphabetic languages, two key studies have proposed contrasting claims, with Wong et al. (2012) proposing holistic processing is present in Chinese character recognition but Hsiao and Cottrell (2009) the opposite. It is nevertheless found that both studies have found extremely high participant sensitivity among trails, and we suspect their findings might be vulnerable to ceiling effects. In view of this, the current study replicated the experiment from Wong et al. (2012), using a composite task paradigm with adaptations. We manipulated the alignment and congruency conditions of Chinese, Korean and pseudo-characters, and we recruited expert readers of Traditional Chinese to test their holistic processing by matching the designated halves of the presented characters while ignoring the other halves. We eventually did not find a congruency-alignment interaction of sensitivity and reaction time among trials of Chinese characters, which indicated that holistic processing may not be present among Chinese character recognition.