The perception of simplified and traditional Chinese characters in the eye of simplified and traditional Chinese readers

Expertise in Chinese character recognition is marked by analytic/reduced holistic processing (Hsiao & Cottrell, 2009), which depends mainly on readers’ writing rather than reading experience (Tso, Au, & Hsiao, 2011). Here we examined whether simplified and traditional Chinese readers process characters differently in terms of holistic processing. When processing characters that are distinctive in the simplified and traditional scripts, we found that simplified Chinese readers were more analytic than traditional Chinese readers in perceiving simplified characters; this effect depended on their writing rather than reading/copying performance. In contrast, the two groups did not differ in holistic processing of traditional characters, regardless of their performance difference in writing/reading traditional characters. When processing characters that are shared in the two scripts, simplified Chinese readers were also more analytic than traditional Chinese readers. These results suggest that simplified Chinese readers may have developed better analytic processing skills than traditional Chinese readers from experiences with simplified characters, and these skills are transferrable to the processing of shared and even traditional characters.