<p>Visual crowding is considered a primary factor limiting reading speed and accuracy. Nevertheless, research on how visual crowding affects the recognition of Chinese characters, especially from a developmental perspective, remains scarce. To address this gap, the present study compared the impact of visual crowding on Chinese character recognition among primary school children and adult university students. Experiment 1 showed significantly higher character recognition accuracy in the uncrowded condition compared to the crowded condition, indicating that crowding significantly affected Chinese character recognition. Furthermore, adults demonstrated significantly higher recognition accuracy than children in both small and large target-flanker separations, suggesting that children are more susceptible to visual crowding than adults. Experiments 2 and 3 further explored the impact of visual crowding by varying character attributes. The results revealed that these attributes significantly affected character crowding, and that adults’ recognition accuracy was higher than children’s across all font types and sizes. Notably, no significant interaction was observed between the participant group and these attributes, indicating that children and adults were similarly affected by these attributes. The present study reveals the differential effects of crowding on Chinese character recognition among children and adults, which can provide valuable insights for optimizing character attributes in reading materials to mitigate the impact of visual crowding and improve reading efficiency.</p>