Abstract: In previous research, people tended to explore the influences of component number on visual perception of Chinese characters based on some methods that didn’t focus on the early stages of processing the form of Chinese characters. As stroke number and structure of Chinese characters, component can be treated as a type of features in the form of Chinese characters. It’s necessary to use the methods that are helpful to explore the mechanism underlying in the early stages of visual perception of Chinese characters. The subjects in the present experiments were asked to identify the form of Chinese characters that were presented in the repeatedly tachistoscopical condition. In experiment 1, characters with 4-component and 2-component were randomly selected from the Basic set of Chinese characters(GB2312-80) and paired in frequency of presentation, stroke distance, stroke number and the pixel number. Undergraduates who were able to speak fluent Mandarin were instructed to name each character as quickly and accurately as possible. The result was that the characters with 4-component were easier to be identified than the correspondingly paired characters with 2-component. In experiment 2, there was no difference between identifying characters with 2-component and 4-component when the characters with 2-component had longer stroke distance. These results showed that there is the effect of component number in the early stage of visual perception of Chinese characters, which refers to the more components involved in a character, the easier to identify the form of the character. The effect suggested that subjects could process the form of Chinese characters based on partial cues (e.g., components). In the discussion part, a partial cue model for processing form of Chinese characters was proposed

Key words: Chinese characters, form of Chinese characters, component, effect of component number