Abstract: Three experiments were carried out to study the visual perception of Chinese characters. The results show that: 1) the order of response time (RT) in the recognition of Chinese cha- racters was: identifying the two components of a character>identifying the whole character>identifying the construction of the character. A si- milar results was obtained for the error rate. These results suggest that there was a perceptual task effect on the recognition of Chinese chara- cters, suggesting that these tasks represented different levels of processing complexity. 2) There was no difference between discriminating the left-rightco- nstruction characters and the up-down construction characters. 3) The surface attributes of a Chinese character such as its constructive and phonetic features did not have an influence on the recognition of the whole character, suggesting that the whole character was the perceptual unit in normal reading. 4) In decomposing the whole character and naming its components, the constructive and/on the phonetic features of a character had a great effe- ct: RT for the up/down characters was much longer than that for the right/left characters; RT for the pictophonetic characters was shorter than that for the unpictophonetic characters and the error rate for pictophon- etic characters was much smaller than for the unpictophonetic characters. The typical error was to name the whole character when the task was to name the components of the character

Key words: NULL