Japanese Kanji Word Processing for Chinese Learners of Japanese: A Study of Homophonic and Semantic Primed Lexical Decision Tasks

Abstract

Abstract-The current study investigates phonological involvement in Japanese word recognition by advanced and intermediate Chinese learners. A homophonic, semantic and unrelated (control) primed lexical decision task was used to test the participants' reactions times (RTs) and accuracy scores. Only the RTs of the participants' accurate YES responses in the lexical decision task (yes/no) were used as dependent measures for evaluation. The results showed that there were no significant effects on priming types as well as proficiency levels. An analysis of the interaction also indicated no effects between priming effects and groups. That is, both the advanced learners and the intermediate learners performed similarly with all prime types. These results support the claim that the Universal Phonological Principle does not apply to Chinese readers when they encounter Japanese Kanji as they do not activate phonological representations while reading Japanese cognates. The present findings constitute a partial explanation of the word recognition process for Chinese learners of Japanese.

Language neutrality of the LLAMA test explored: The case of agglutinative languages and multiple writing systems

“…Hungarian and Dutch are written using the Latin alphabet, which is a phonogram writing system. The two Japanese syllabic alphabets (hiragana and katakana) are also categorized as phonogram systems, whilst Japanese kanji is regarded as a logogram because each character of kanji depicts a specific meaning (Coderre et al, 2008;Tanaka, 2015). The most distinctive aspects of Japanese compared to both other languages in the present study may therefore be the number of writing systems used: Japanese uses two syllabic phonogram systems and one logographic writing system.…”

“…The Japanese writing system motivated the reinvestigation of the language neutrality of the LLAMA test because of its combination of orthographies. It is noteworthy that using both kana and kanji could affect cognitive processing (Coderre et al, 2008;Sakurai et al, 2000) because syllabic writing systems connect visual forms (graphemes) to sounds (phonemes), whilst logographic writing systems join forms (characters) with meanings (morphemes) and sounds (phonemes) (Coderre et al, 2008 processed differently (Tanaka, 2015). Such differential processing may transfer when reading in the L2, such that L2 learners with an alphabetic L1 background and L2 learners with nonalphabetic L1 backgrounds rely on different types of information during lexical processing in the L2 .…”

www.kanjidatabase.com: a new interactive online database for psychological and linguistic research on Japanese kanji and their compound words

“…In research JLPT levels are typically used to control difficulties of lexical items when participants are non-native speakers (e.g. Komori, Tamaoka, Saito, & Miyaoka, 2014;Tanaka, 2015;Yamato, & Tamaoka, 2013).…”