A legibility study of chinese character complicacy and eye movement data¹

This study investigated the correlations between the complicacy and legibility of Chinese characters by using eye tracking analyzed with structural equation modeling. 13 university students, 6 men and 7 women, with a mean age of 21 yr. (SD = 1.7) participated. The results indicated that block types aff ected legibility and that saccade amplitude, number of fi xations, and complicacy diff ered due to diverse character structures. Structural Equation Modeling showed that the number of strokes, number of nodes, and image density in stroke complicacy aff ected the number of fi xations and saccade amplitude in eye movement data. Constructing a character complicacy and eye tracking information model to investigate the correlations between Chinese character features and human viewing behavior can provide guidance for Chinese character recognizability and type design.