The inconsistency of consistency effects in reading: The case of Japanese Kanji.

Abstract

Most Japanese Kanji characters have several different pronunciations, at least one ON-reading (of Chinese origin) and a KUN-reading (of Japanese origin); the appropriate pronunciation is determined by intraword wntext. There are also Kanji characters that have a single ON-reading and no KUN-reading. With 2-character ON-reading Kanji words as stimuli, naming experiments were carried out to investigate print-to-sound consistency effects. The consistent Kanji words were those in which neither constituent character had an alternative ON-reading or a KUN-reading, hence there can be no pronunciation ambiguity for these words. The inconsistent items were ON-reading words composed of characters that have KUN-readings that are appropriate to other words in which the characters occur, hence there should be some ambiguity about the pronunciation of the constituent characters. Six experiments yielded reliable effects of both word and character frequency and familiarity on speed and accuracy of word naming but virtually no evidence for consistency effects. It was concluded that for Kanji, phonology is dominantly computed at the word rather than at the character level.

Semantic context effects when naming Japanese kanji, but not Chinese hànzì

“…Kanji with multiple readings were named slower, indicating that some processing cost was incurred compared to single reading kanji (Experiment 1). Such cost also emerged when mid-frequency kanji were used, except when alternative readings were weak (Experiment 2) which is in line with findings by Wydell, Butterworth, and Patterson (1995). To recapitulate, Chinese and Japanese logographs differ in that Japanese kanji often have more than one pronunciation whereas Chinese hànzì generally have a single pronunciation.…”

“…This difference may be reflected in processing differences during reading aloud. Being logographic languages, both Chinese hànzì and Japanese kanji cannot be processed via a GPC route (Siok, Perfetti, Jin, & Tan, 2004;Wydell et al, 1995). Within the model depicted in Fig.…”

Semantic Effects in Word Naming: Evidence from English and Japanese Kanji

“…For KUN reading, a single character can be used as a word (with a concrete meaning in most cases) and it can also be combined with other characters to make multi-character words; whereas for ON reading there are hardly any single-character words. For most Kanji characters with more than one reading, the appropriate pronunciation is determined by the intra-word context-that is, the other character(s) with which the particular character combines to constitute the word in question (see Wydell, Butterworth, & Patterson, 1995). Originally, the meaning of Kanji characters was thought to be accessed directly from its orthographic representation without need to access phonological information (Feldman & Turvey, 1980;Goryo, 1987;Kimura, 1984;Saito, 1981).…”

Cross-Cultural/Linguistic Differences in the Prevalence of Developmental Dyslexia and the Hypothesis of Granularity and Transparency

“…For Kana, where the character-to-sound-mapping is transparent, a simple on-line phonological processing (i.e., sublexical analytical reading) strategy might be used (Wydell & Butterworth, 1999;Rastle, Havelka, Wydell, Coltheart, Besner 2009), just like other consistent orthographies such as Italian (de Luca, et al, 2010;Zoccolotti et al, 2005) or German (Landerl et al, 1997). In contrast, for Kanji, because the character-to-soundrelationship is opaque, and the correct pronunciation is determined at the whole-word level, a lexical whole-word reading strategy might be used (e.g., Morton, Sasanuma, Patterson & Sakuma, 1992;Wydell, 1998;Wydell & Butterworth, 1999;Wydell, et al, 1993;Wydell, Butterworth & Patterson, 1995; however also see Fushimi, Ijuin, Patterson & Tatsumi, 1999 for counter argument).…”

“…This is because each Kanji character is a morphographic element that cannot phonetically be decomposed in the way that an alphabetic word can be. There are no separate components of a character that correspond to the individual phonemes (see Wydell, Patterson & Butterworth, 1995 for a further discussion). Also, most Kanji characters have one or more ON-readings, (pronunciations that were imported from spoken Chinese along with their corresponding characters) as well as a KUN-reading from the original Japanese spoken language.…”