Abstract: Both naming task and character decision task were used to investigate the stroke number effect and radical number effect in the processing of Chinese characters.Results indicated that 1) a character with fewer strokes is accessed faster than a character with more strokes when their radical numbers were matched;2) there is no significant interaction between stroke number and character frequency;3) radical number effect only existed in low frequency characters;4) processing of a character included three levels,namely stroke,radical,and character;and 5) processing time of a character is affected by the stroke numbers per radical and the radical number.

Key words: Chinese character, stroke number effect, radical number effect, character frequency