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A study of the reading direction and character position as these factors influence the speed of reading Chinese. Characters were printed on cards and exposed by a special type of quadrant tachistoscope. The subjects were required to read these cards in four directions. By altering the position of the characters and the direction of reading, the speed of reading Chinese was found to be impaired in the extreme case by about 19.6%. The change from normal downward reading of upright characters to upward reading showed a 16.7% decrement. Position of the characters is a more important factor in determining the speed than the direction of reading, and it was found better in all position to read from right to left than from left to right, and better to tilt the characters to the right for "up and left" reading, and to the left for "down and right" reading, although tilting characters to the right is better for all directions of reading as a whole. Reading direction is the least important factor in speed of reading Chinese, while character position is the most important factor. A bibliography of 34 titles accompanies the article.

The instrument presently to be described is similar in its general function to the Kuhlmann (8) and the Dearborn-Langfeld (i) forms of exposure apparatus designed for moderately brief time-exposure. It may therefore be conveniently classed with the tachistoscopes, certain forms of which have long been used by psychologists for the measurement of short times. For various instruments designed to provide relatively long exposures we may adopt Esper's 2 term bradyscope (5). Bradyscopes and tachistoscopes belong to the same general class since they are all apparatus for exposing perceptual material for experimentation under temporal control.Five types of bradyscope used for memorial presentation may be distinguished; (i) the drum type of Schumann (13) and Meumann (10), later modified to a 'step-down' form by G. E. Miiller ( 12), (ii) the jail type of Minnemann (12) and Kuhlmann (8), (iii) the disc type of Ranschburg (11, 12), Wirth (17) and Lipmann ( 7), (iv) the booklet type of Baird (6) and Schulze (12), and (v) the endless-band type of Wirth (18), Wohlgemuth ( 14) and Esper (5).As Galileo was first (1609) to describe and exhibit in complete form the telescope and hence was conventionally known as its inventor, although it had been known for a long time before him, so we may credit the invention of the tachis-1 The construction of the tachistoscope was financed by the Thomas Welton Stanford Fund for Psychological Research. Constant encouragement and support from Professor Walter R. Miles have been a continuous incentive. Helpful suggestions have come from Mr. F. D. Banham, Mechanician Shop, Stanford University. Mr. Chien P'ei has taken the pictures of the tachistoscope. * Esper's particular type of bradyscope is used for the exposure of verbal, graphic and pictorial material to be memorized.

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Introduction.-In the third paper of this series on Reading and Legibility of Chinese Characters, two experiments had been reported on judging positions of Chinese characters by American subjects. 2 Experiment I was an intensive individual experiment with the author's Quadrant Bradyscope 3 through simultaneous, voluntarily maintained exposure 4 of 64 Chinese characters by and to 7 subjects themselves. This first experiment revealed the fact that while correct judgments of the four possible positions of Chinese characters, i.e. upright, upside-down, turned-to-the-right, and turned-to-the-left, amounted to about 65 percent, the incorrect judgments ranged from about 26 percent for Opposite errors, about 5 percent for Analogous errors, and about 4 percent for Crossed errors. 6 This inequality of prevalence of the different kinds of incorrect judgments needed further analysis as to its cause. Why is there a tendency on the part of foreigners to judge 1 The writer is indebted to Mr. Chao-Tang Lei for the preliminary statistical calculations and tabulations, upon which all the final percentages reported in this paper were recalculated by the writer himself. 1 This paper is the fourth of a series on Reading and Legibility of Chinese characters. The first three appeared in this JOURNAL: I. Influence of reading-direction and character-position upon speed, 1929, ia, 156-177; II. Reading half-characters, 1930, *3. 33 2 ~3S I » HI. Judging the positions of Chinese characters by American subjects, 1930. 13, 438-4S2. •S. K. Chou, A quadrant tachistoscope for studying the legibility of Chinese characters, this JOURNAL, 1929, 13, 178-186. 4 S. K. Chou, Reaction-keys and a new technique for reading-reactions, Anur. J.