Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Relationship Between Level Of Expertise And Holistic Processing In Chinese Character Recognition, Shirley Yin Ming Leung

Honors Theses

Evidence from past research suggests that when people process objects in which they are experts, such as faces and Roman letters, they usually engage in holistic processing which is the processing of multiple parts of a stimulus (Bukach, Gauthier, & Tarr, 2006; Wong et al., 2011). However, Hsiao and Cottrell (2009) found the opposite result such that novices used holistic processing in Chinese character recognition while experts did not. The current study explored the correlation between expertise and holistic processing of Chinese characters. We used the composite task to measure holistic processing of Chinese characters from English native- speakers who …