Letter recognition of Germans and Chinese - similarities in attention allocation and differences in encoding

Abstract

Germans and Chinese participated in letter recognition experiments based on the Sperling paradigm. They were instructed to report as many items as possible from a briefly exposed two-row matrix of letters from the Latin alphabet. In Experiment 1, the Germans performed better than the Chinese. In addition, a position effect was found in that participants correctly reported more letters from the first row than from the second row. In Experiment 2, the position effect was replicated even though the response mode prompted participants to report items from the bottom row first. In Experiment 3, the instruction as to how to allocate attention influenced the position effect. The performance lead of the Germans, as compared to the Chinese, was independent of these instructions. It is hypothesized that reading habits have influenced the allocation of attention and that language-specific encoding of the letters caused the differences in performance.