Abstract: Chinese characters are comprised of a variety of strokes with some simple features such as dots, lines, and curves. Are all strokes within a character equally important in the character identification? There are some studies to explore this field. The preliminary results showed that beginning strokes play a more central role in character identification than ending strokes. And it was clearly the case that certain strokes are more central to successful character identification than the others. To explain such effect, a hypothesis has been put forward in the present study, “The order of writing affects the identification.” The present study was based on the study of Yan et al. (2012). But a more sensitive and accurate indicator was chose to investigate the role of stroke encoding in character identification. Instead of the number of the strokes, the present experiment tried to use the “pixel”, the basic unit made up a stroke, to examine the effect. This experiment is a 2(Removal Type: Beginning, Ending) ×3(Percentage of Pixels Removed: 15%, 30% and 50%) within-subject design. In addition to these six experimental conditions, a control condition was included in which no strokes were deleted from the characters. Thirty-five undergraduate students participated in the experiment. Participants’ eye movements were recorded with a SR Research EyeLink 2000 eye tracker. Each participant was tested individually. Global analyses were conducted based on measures of reading behavior across the whole sentence. Repeated measures ANOVAs and pairwise comparisons were carried out. All the measures showed that Chinese characters with 15% of pixels removed were as easy to read as Chinese characters without any pixels removed. However, when 30%, or more of a character’s pixels were removed, there was a robust effect in relation to the percentage of pixels removed: readers made more and longer fixations, more regressions and forward saccades, and longer total reading time when reading text with increased percentages of pixels removed. Thus, it appears that text with more pixels removed produced more disruption to Chinese reading. Also, there was a robust effect on pixel removal type. Characters with beginning pixels removed were more difficult than that with ending pixels removed. The results suggested that not all strokes within a character are of equal importance in the character identification processing. That is, a stroke is laid down during Chinese character production, to some extent at least, determines how important that stroke is in relation to character identification in reading. Strokes that are laid down early during written character production appear to be more important than strokes laid down late. And to the most important, these results supported our hypothesis that the order of writing affects the identification both in English and Chinese.

Key words: Chinese reading, Character strokes, Chinese character precessing, Pixels removal, Eye movements

摘要： 在前人笔画省略实验的基础上，采用“像素省略”这一更精确的变量操纵来探讨笔画省略对汉字识别的影响。实验采用2（像素省略方式：省前、略后）×3（像素省略水平：15%、30%、50%）被试内设计，分析整句阅读的眼动轨迹。结果显示，像素省略水平越高对阅读的干扰越大，省前条件下对阅读的干扰显著大于略后条件。结果进一步证实了汉字书写顺序对汉字识别的影响，先书写的笔画比后书写的笔画对汉字的识别起到更大的作用，即笔画顺序效应。

关键词: 中文阅读, 汉字笔画, 汉字加工, 像素省略, 眼动