Since China announced the “Chinese Character Simplification Scheme” in 1956, two sides of the straits have had different usage of Chinese characters, which is Traditional or Simplified. This situation has been there for 60 years and we have noticed that, although simplified characters make it easy to remember and write, some original concepts of the characters, such as Chinese culture or how the character was created, have been lost. As Chinese characters consist of “format”, “sound”, and “meaning”, which are closely connected with one another, simplified Chinese have made it inconsistent with the original Chinese characters as they have become simple lines and symbols. When people are learning Chinese, they are not able to understand the close relationship between the format and the meaning or the rich Chinese culture carried by the character. The research motive is from the trend in the survey of university students about their concepts of the usage of traditional and simplified characters. The research will further explain how the format and the meaning of ancient Chinese characters were closely connected.

The lexical decision (LD) task requires participants to response with speeded and accurate actions, which makes the process of identifying a word automatic without labor and therefore probably reflects the similar word identification process in natural reading. With manipulating the presentation duration of target words, the LD task allows the early visual orthographic processing to be involved. In the current study, we recruited the lexical decision (LD) task to probe the possible pattern difference in perceiving Chinese characters by the young adult skilled Hong Kong traditional Chinese character (HKC) readers and the Mainland China simplified Chinese character (MLC) readers. The first part of stimuli consisted of 20 real simplified Chinese characters and 20 real traditional Chinese characters, which differed significantly in their stroke numbers and covered both the left‐right (LF) and top‐bottom (TB) structure. The second part of stimuli were pseudo characters, constructed based on the 40 real Chinese characters by rearranging the left and right parts or the top and bottom parts of them. These stimuli were presented on the computer screen with manipulating its presentation duration and adding a mask behind each target stimulus. Results revealed an intriguing trend in the correct RTs (reaction times) for both real characters and pseudo characters that the MLC simplified character readers’ RTs tended to be longer with the increase of stroke numbers in characters, while the HKC traditional character readers showed an opposite pattern, that is, their RTs tending to be shorter with the increase of stroke numbers in characters. These results firstly suggested that the number of strokes probably plays opposite roles in the MLC and HKC participants’ perception of characters. The results further implied that the MLC and HKC participants probably use stroke numbers, even component numbers (constructed by strokes) or some other information which reflects the structure and visual spatial features of characters in different ways in their perception or recognition of characters. 

There are currently two Chinese writing systems in use in Chinese speaking regions, namely simplified and traditional Chinese, and the effects of simplifying the script have aroused some discussion over last two decades. Recent research suggested that analytic/reduced holistic processing (i.e., identifying individual components of an object rather than gluing features together into a gestalt) is an expertise marker in Chinese character recognition (Hsiao & Cottrell, 2009), which depends mainly on readers’ writing rather than reading experience (Tso, Au, & Hsiao, 2011).  Based on these findings, the current study took a cognitive perspective and examined whether and how simplified and traditional Chinese readers perceive simplified and traditional Chinese characters in terms of holistic processing. Results showed that when processing characters that are shared between the two Chinese scripts, both simplified and traditional Chinese readers demonstrated a similar level of reading and writing abilities, as well as holistic processing. When processing characters that are distinctive in the two scripts, simplified Chinese readers were more analytic than traditional Chinese readers in perceiving simplified characters; this effect depended on their writing rather than reading/copying performance. On the contrary, the two groups of readers did not differ in holistic processing of traditional characters, regardless of their performance difference in writing/copying of traditional characters. In sum, these results indicate that both simplified and traditional Chinese expert readers have developed analytic processing skills in the scripts they are familiar with; nevertheless, whereas simplified Chinese readers could transfer this skill to the processing of traditional characters, traditional Chinese readers could not in the processing of simplified characters. The better generalization ability in simplified Chinese readers may be due to a larger variance in visual form of simplified characters as compared with that of traditional counterparts.