Study of Influence of Foreign Characters in Guide Signs on Legibility

Abstract

An experiment was performed to investigate the legibility of guide signs with different language to discuss the effect of foreign characters added in guide signs on driver reaction time. Experimental signs were divided into different groups by different language combinations: Chinese only, Chinese and foreign characters (English or other language), and the combination of them. Each group contained 7 experimental signs. 67 traffic participants were selected at random for testing, experimental signs were presented and the participants’ reaction time was recorded by DMDX system. The reaction time of monolingual, bilingual and trilingual signs under static condition was measured respectively, and descriptive statistics and variance analysis for experiment data were conducted. The result shows that there is no significant difference between monolingual and bilingual signs, while there is significant difference of trilingual sign with other signs.