Processing of Kanji and Kana characters within Japanese words

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to examine the temporal relationship between whole-word and charaeter processing in Japanese. Two kinds of Japanese script were used as stimuli: Kanji, an ideographie script, and Kana, a syllabic script. In Experiment 1, Kanji word processing and Kanji character processing were examined using a successive visual comparison task. The wholeword advantage <Marmurek, 1986) was not found. In Experiment 2, Kana words and characters were used. As in Experiment 1, no whole-word advantage was found. The absence of the wholeword advantage is attributed to the fact that Kanji and Kana characters represent higher level units of processing than alphabetic letters. The difference between word and nonword processing was shown by manipulations of the visual similarity and the homophony between stimuli presented successively. Visualsimilarity affected both words and nonwords, whereas homophony affected words only.When two words were presented successively, decisions about the identity of the two words were made faster than decisions about the identity of a single alphabetic letter (hereafter, referred to as a letter) contained within a word (Johnson, 1975;Marmurek, 1986Marmurek, , 1987. This empirical phenomenon has been referred to as the word-priority effect (Sloboda, 1977) or the whole-word advantage (Marmurek, 1986). The implications of the whole-word advantage for hierarchical and race models, which are often referred to in the study of word perception, have been discussed. Both types of model assume that a word may be represented at various levels (i.e., at the feature level, the letter level, and the word level). Hierarchical models (e.g., McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981;Paap, Newsome, McDonald, & Schvaneveldt, 1981) assume that letter-level detectors provide output to higher level detectors, and that once the highest level detector is activated, it will control subsequent processing. For example, word-Ievel units provide excitatory feedback to letter-level units (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981), or word-Ievel units control the verification and decision stages (Paap et al., 1981). This type of model implies that same-different comparisons for activated word-level units could be made direct1y, whereas letter-level comparisons would await further processing of the component detectors (Marmurek, 1986). The interpretation by race models (e.g., Allen & We are grateful to Eiji Yodogawa for providing the opportunity to do this study, and to Philip A. Allen, Ken Goryo, Lester E. Krueger, Harvey H. C. Mannurek, Stephen E. Palmer, and one anonymous reviewer for their many helpful comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript. Michiko Shimomura is now at Nara National College of Technology, Nara, Japan. Correspondencemay be addressed to Kazuhiko Yokosawa, now at NTT Basic Research Laboratories, 3-9-11 Midoricho, Musashino-shi, Tokyo 180, Japan.19 Madden, 1990;Chambers & Forster, 1975) is that wordlevel processing and letter-level processing occur simultaneously, and that the word-level processing is complet...

Японские Интернет-Тексты В Контексте Кодов Японской Культуры

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