Effects of Minimal Legible Size Characters on Chinese Word Recognition
Sheng‐Hsiung Hsu, Kuo‐Chen Huang · Visible Language · 2001
PROQUEST INFORMATION AND LEARNING: FOREIGN CHARACTERS OMITTED. ABSTRACT Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of minimal legible size characters on Chinese word recognition. In Experiment 1, the minimal legible size was determined empirically to be the character size necessary to attain ninety-five percent correct recognition for various Chinese characters which differed in the number of strokes comprising the character, ranging from three to twenty-seven. The results showed that the minimal legible sizes were larger for characters with more strokes. This indicates that characters with more strokes should be enlarged to attain the same recognition performance as that from characters with fewer strokes. Experiment 2 investigated recognition accuracy for a string of minimal legible size characters, versus, conventional equal size characters. The results showed that accuracy rate for the minimal legible size condition was higher than that for the conventional size condition. Although Chinese characters presented with their minimal legible size might change the present word configuration, the results suggest that minimal legible size of characters might help readers recognize words in situations where reading time is extremely short. In particular, the results suggest that minimal legible size Chinese characters may be appropriate in the design of warning or emergency signs. Chapanis (1965) called attention to a very important but often neglected area of human factors: the written information associated with the tools, machines, systems and operations, which have more often been the focus of research. Negligence of this particular issue has continued over the past two decades (Chapanis, 1988). Advances in technology and automation have resulted in the introduction of increasingly complex products, machinery, operational activities and systems that require increasingly more complex written information to communicate between humans and machines. This expansion of information has contributed to the creation of brochures, warning signs, illustrations and operational manuals that are frequently incapable of being adequately understood by their users. The design of such written information for accurate and efficient human processing deserves more study. An important concern regarding the design of written information is legibility. Legibility refers to the ease of identifying individual alphanumeric characters. Poor legibility may result in the information being difficult to read, and thus a deterrent to reading it. Important determinants of legibility are contrast, typographic style and size. Given adequate contrast, legibility is strongly affected by the type style. Much research has shown that character size significantly influences legibility (Chang and Konz, 1993; Imbeau et al., 1989; Joseph and Uhlarik, 1992; Miyao et al., 1988; Silver and Braun, 1993). Some studies (Bouwhuis, 1993; Vigilante and Wogalter, 1998) showed the effect of character size on reading performance was significant for elderly readers. In order to obtain good text legibility, an important question is how large a character must be to be identified and discriminated from adjacent characters. Although extensive guidelines exist with respect to character size, contrast and typography, problematic issues remain concerning the spatial arrangement and characteristics of the elements within a character, in particular, those affecting discriminability of the elements, and thereby the recognition process. In English, each word may fill a different amount of space, for example, the space for people is twice that for the. But, the discriminability for the letters of these two words is probably quite similar. However, written Chinese characters are square-shaped, and all characters occupy equal spaces. Some characters have few strokes, while others have twenty or more strokes. Thus, the discriminability of the strokes that form the equal size characters is different. …