Position, Visual Complexity, and Semantic Radicals in Left-Right Structured Chinese Characters: A Naturalistic Experiment on Character Simplification

Abstract

Abstract In the mid-20th century, the largest sociocultural psychological “experiment” in the history of Chinese orthography was carried out to simplify the traditional characters. To date, little or no psychological research has addressed the factors behind the simplification process. This article reports on an exploratory investigation that focused on the possible effects of position, visual complexity, and semantic radicals on simplification of the components of left-right structured traditional Chinese characters (Japanese kanji). The main findings are that the left- and right-side components are simplified equally often, that the left-side components are visually simpler than the right-side components, that the threshold for simplification is 6 strokes for the left-side components and 8 strokes for the right-side components, and that, with visual complexity held constant, the right-side components are more exempt from simplification than the left-side components. Three theoretical principles are proposed to account for character simplification: Pay attention to the left, start simple and meaningful, and simplify the less informative. Understanding the processes behind simplification will allow us to improve the present-day Chinese characters.