Abstract: he experiment was conducted to inspect the effects of the whole Chinese character and the frequencies of the strokes on the cognition of the strokes. The results indicated that there was character-inferior effect in the cognition of the strokes, the time of spotting isolated strokes was shorter than that of spotting the strokes which existed in Chinese characters, and the rate of errors of spotting isolated strokes was longer than that of spotting the strokes which existed in Chinese characters. The cognition of the strokes also was affected by the number of the strokes of contextual Chinese characters. The subjects recognized the strokes of Chinese characters which had small number of strokes faster than the strokes of Chinese characters which had large number of strokes. The frequencies of the strokes played an important role in the cognition of strokes, high- frequency strokes were recognized faster than low-frequency strokes. The whole results supported the hypothesis that the strokes of Chinese characters are basic units in the processing of Chinese characters and showed that the strokes are processed automatically in the processing of Chinese characters in general

Key words: the whole Chinese character, the frequency of the strokes, the cognition of the strokes