ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Virtual Real.
Sec. Virtual Reality and Human Behaviour
Volume 6 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frvir.2025.1579525
Understanding Glyph Characteristics on the Legibility for Native and Non-Native Speakers in Virtual Reality
Provisionally accepted
- Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan
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Multilingual communication shapes education, culture, and decision-making, yet we lack a clear picture of how native writing systems influence visual processing. In virtual reality experiments, we compared Chinese and Japanese logographic readers with English alphabetic readers, we found that logographic users read faster but are more prone to confusion when glyphs look similar, while alphabetic users read more slowly and struggle with structural complexity. Crucially, these patterns persist even when participants read non-native scripts, revealing a lasting " visual perceptual divergence" driven by nativescript experience. Our results offer practical guidance for designing adaptive VR interfaces and developing writing-system-specific language-learning tools.
Keywords: Glyph, multilingual, human behavior, visual perceptual divergence, virtual reality, Legibility
Received: 19 Feb 2025; Accepted: 21 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhang, Sakamoto and Ono. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Huidan Zhang, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan
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