Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous work has demonstrated that the visual complexity ofletter-shapes is processed differently by naïve and expertobservers. Specifically, fluent readers of the Arabic alphabetwere found to discriminate complex letters more readily thanless complex letters, whereas naïve observers exhibited theopposite effect. This “complexity benefit”, wherein complexletters confer a processing advantage to expert observers, isnot yet well understood. In a new study, we investigatewhether this effect generalizes across scripts, and whether itis unique to individuals with biscriptal experience (knowledgeof reading two different scripts). The results of the threeexperiments confirm that the complexity benefit ischaracteristic of expert monoscriptal and biscriptal readers,and that, furthermore, there may be a biscriptal advantage inprocessing visual complexity.