Why does written Chinese, which employs logographic principles, exhibit relatively slower reading speeds compared to alphabetic writing systems when eye-tracking is employed?

💡 Explanation

Chinese characters require the visual system to process more intricate patterns and semantic-phonetic mappings for each character, because each grapheme represents a morpheme. This results in a greater cognitive load per unit, and slower reading speeds. Therefore, alphabetic systems are often faster, rather than having readers process more semantic content per character.

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