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आभ्यंतर (Aabhyantar) SCONLI-12 विशेषांक ISSN : 2348-7771
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41. Role of strokes in character complexity
Sreerakuvandana : University of Hyderabad
The term
complexity can be understood from two points of view: complexity from the point
of view of the writer; complexity from the point of the reader. Kohler [1]
refers to these as Production complexity and Decoding
complexity respectively. These, he further categorizes based on Muscular/
Nervous Effort and Cognitive Effort. This kind of complexity is seen as the
effort needed to produce a particular akṣara. Post graphemically,visual complexity is another kind of
complexity that contributes to ‘load’. It is the effort that is needed to
recognize or decode a particular character. Visual complexity is however
subjective, because people who are exposed to, or know different writing
system, could calculate or view complexity differently. Therefore, it is at
best to only quantify for the factors that contribute to the complexity of a
character, visually.
Stroke count is ideal and interesting in this regard. Stroke can be defined as the basic hand
movements and the shapes that a character includes to create its primary shape. A stroke can be primary or complex. Naturally, a complex
stroke will consist of a number of primary strokes. For example, a primary
stroke in a language could simply be a straight line and a complex stroke is
the one that could be a series of lines in the form of an arch or cross over on
a primary stroke to make up a character. This way, we could conclusively
quantify the complexity of a character in the form of a number.
The present
study is carried out in Tamil, the Asokan branch of Brahmi script. The first experiment
aims to measure the reaction time of the participants to nonsense words, that
are characterized as linear and non-linear based on the side the vowel
diacritic markers take. For example,
Vowels:
2. Left: கே
3. Bottom: கு
The vowels (1)
and (2) are non-linear, in the sense that, there is a mismatch in the
articulation and the written form. In (3) and (4), the graphemes representing
the segments are encountered in the same sequence in which they are
articulated.
While
the results showed a highly significant value, supporting linearity as the
norm, the study further wanted to see if the role of strokes actually have a
role to play in the processing bias. Therefore, this study will interpret the
results within the linearity category and non-linearity category separately to
see the effect of strokes (measured on certain point system devised by Altmann
[2]) on processing.
The
experiment will be deployed using the Psychopy experiment builder and analysed
in R 32 bit. The subjects are the native Tamil speakers, chosen in the age
group from 22-29 randomly.
References:
[1] Kohler, Reinhard,
and Fengxiang Fan in Analyses of Script: Properties of Characters and
Writing Systems. Mouton De Gruyter, 2008.
[2] Altmann, Gabriel, and Fengxiang Fan. Analyses
of Script: Properties of Characters and Writing Systems. Mouton De Gruyter,
2008.
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