Iconicity of simple Chinese characters

The iconicity of a Chinese character, or the degree to which it looks like the concept that it represents, has been suggested as affecting the learning and processing of the character. However, previous studies have not provided good empirical information on the iconicity of specific characters. To fill this gap, 40 U.S. adults with no knowledge of Chinese were given an English word or short phrase together with two Chinese characters and were asked which character matched the meaning of the English word. The right and wrong answers had the same number of strokes, and different wrong answers were used for different participants. We examined all 213 simple-structure Chinese characters that occur in textbooks for elementary school children. The overall percentage of correct responses was 53.6%, slightly but significantly higher than would be expected by chance. Using a false discovery rate procedure, we found that 15 of the 213 characters were guessed at a level higher than chance. The proportion of correct responses to each character, which can be taken as an indicator of its degree of iconicity, should be useful to researchers studying Chinese character reading and writing. The full database, showing the proportion of correct guesses and other psycholinguistic variables for each character, can be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental .