Comparison of identification of Chinese versus English words with brief exposures

The orthographic differences between Chinese and English should influence the identification of words in the two languages. This study compared the identification of 50 Chinese and 50 comparable English words by 17 Chinese and 17 English participants, respectively. For English words, correlation and analysis of variance indicated significant effects for frequency and letter count. For Chinese words, the same statistical analyses yielded a significant frequency effect. Both analyses also showed stroke count of the first Chinese character was not related to accuracy of identification, while the two analyses yielded inconsistent results concerning relationships between the stroke count of the second character and accuracy of identification. These studies did not employ a masking stimulus, and 5 msec. were enough to activate sensory memory of most Chinese words, while 10 msec. were needed for most English words. These differences were significant by Wilcoxon rank-sum tests.