A study on the cognitive of complexity and difficulty of chinese characters when reading and recognizing

The Index of cognitive Information Complexity (Cinfo) and the Index of cognitive Information Difficulty (Dinfo) are measured at the psychological level for the application of learning and design when people are reading and recognizing the characters; thus, how to effectively monitor the information complexity and difficulty for the purpose of educational learning and design becomes an essential issue. This study combines information theory and Fitts’ Law to propose the concept of Information Mass (Minfo) and through the test of the Cinfo and Dinfo toward the Minfo of Chinese characters, the subjects are surveyed for measuring the complexity and difficulty of 218 selected Chinese characters. The results indicate that there is no significant discrepancy in the Cinfo of genders. The result of regression analysis indicates that the correlation coefficient of logarithm value of Minfo and Cinfo is 0.684 and RSQ equals to 0.468. On the other hand, the Paired-Samples T-test shows the discrepancy of the Dinfo on Chinese characters between and among different groups. Overall, the Minfo threshold value to recognize the Dinfo on Chinese characters between male and female subjects reaches to 0.017; among it, the Minfo threshold value for male and female high school students is 0.06; for male and female university students is 0.01. The average value of Dinfo between genders found in regression analysis indicates the correlation coefficient of Minfo and Dinfo is 0.861 and RSQ is 0.741. From results of this study, subjects are shown to have closer relations between Minfo and Dinfo than that of Minfo and Cinfo. In the other words, the concept to apply Minfo gives reasonable explanation to the difficulty of Chinese characters and the model of linear regression serves the function for the reference of educational learning and design.