Judgment of Meaningfulness of Chinese Characters by English-Speaking Observers

Abstract

Liu and Chuang (1970) obtained measures of meaningfulness for 1,200 Chinese characters from ratings made by literate Chinese. A sample of these characters rated by persons unfamiliar with Chinese showed that the amount of perceptual information conveyed to English-speaking observers correlates with Liu and Chuang’s index for Chinese-speaking individuals. For English-speaking observers, meaningfulness appears more closely related to visual form characteristics than is the case for the Chinese reader. Results of the study provide a further hypothesis: that the Chinese language evolved according to a visual "simplicity" principle. Results also suggest that conclusions from some experiments involving Chinese characters as stimuli may be limited by ignorance of the role that visual dimensions play in discrimination of language forms.