The nature of orthographic–phonological and orthographic–semantic relationships for Japanese kana and kanji words

Hino, Yasushi; Miyamura, Shinobu; Lupker, Stephen J.

doi:10.3758/s13428-011-0101-0

Cited by 22 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Although the strong correlations between writing and semantic factors appear to be contrary to the distinctiveness of the dimensions, these close relationships are expected considering the highly consistent relationship between kanji orthography and semantics 32 . Even when the meaning of kanji is unknown, we can sometimes read them aloud.…”

Section: Multidimensionality Of Japanese Kanji Abilitiesmentioning

confidence: 74%

The multidimensionality of Japanese kanji abilities

Otsuka

Murai

2020

Sci Rep

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the aim of this study was to identify the cognitive structures of kanji abilities in the Japanese general population and to examine age and cohort effects on them. From a large database of the most popular kanji exam in Japan, we analyzed high school graduation level data of 33,659 people in 2006 and 16,971 people in 2016. Confirmatory factor analyses validated the three-dimensional model of kanji abilities, including factors of reading, writing and semantic comprehension. Furthermore, the age effect on writing, and correlations between writing and semantic dimensions, were different between 2006 and 2016, suggesting reduced writing ability and stagnation in integrated mastery of kanji orthography and semantics in current-day Japanese adults. These findings provide the first evidence of the multidimensional nature of Japanese kanji abilities, and age/cohort differences in that dimensional structure. The importance of the habit of handwriting for literacy acquisition is discussed.Writing systems can be broadly divided into phonographic and logographic scripts. In the former, a letter is mapped onto a sound unit, as in English. In the latter, a character is mapped onto a meaning unit, as for Chinese. Japanese uses both systems in combination, namely kana and kanji. Each kana letter represents one mora, a sub-syllabic unit of sound in Japanese, with highly regular and consistent letter-sound correspondence. In contrast, kanji characters usually have multiple pronunciations, which can also be written with more than one kana letter. The correct pronunciations of Japanese kanji words are determined by context and at the whole-word level, in a similar manner to English exception words, unlike the Chinese logographic writing systems. Kanji characters are used for content words (i.e. most nouns, or the roots of most verbs, adjectives, or adverbs), whereas kana letters are mainly used for inflectional endings, postpositions, or conjunctions. A single kanji character or more than two in the so-called compound words, occasionally accompanied by kana suffixes, can represent a word. Many homophones in the Japanese language are represented with the exact same kana letters but have different meanings, and can be discriminated by writing in kanji. In addition, unlike kana or alphabetical letters, kanji characters vary in visual complexity from simple characters such as the kanji カ to very complex ones like 鬱 (u-tsu, depression), both of which are designated as daily-use kanji by the Japanese government.Considering the unique properties of kanji, including multiple pronunciations, semantic values, and variability in visual complexity, it is assumed that the abilities to master and manage Japanese kanji would be multidimensional as for overall language ability 1,2 . However, the dimensional structure, whether uni-or multidimensional, has not been established. Given the higher prevalence of problems in literacy acquisition in kanji than in kana among Japanese children 3 , understanding the functional components of Japanese kanji abi...

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Section: Multidimensionality Of Japanese Kanji Abilitiesmentioning

confidence: 74%

The multidimensionality of Japanese kanji abilities

Otsuka

Murai

2020

Sci Rep

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“…Thus, as with Chinese characters, many would argue that Kanji characters directly activate meaning, and, essentially, Kanji characters can be considered to be morphemes. Also worth noting is that, according to Tamaoka, Kirsner, Yanase, Miyaoka, and Kawakami (2002), more than 60% of Kanji characters possess multiple pronunciations (i.e., Kun-reading and On-reading pronunciations), making it difficult for Kanji-written words to activate semantics through a phonologically mediated route (but see Hino, Miyamura, & Lupker, 2011, for an evaluation of the similarity of the orthographic-phonological relationships for words written in Kana vs. Kanji).…”

Section: Orthographic and Phonological Neighbors Of Japanese Wordsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of orthography in the semantic activation of neighbors.

Hino

Lupker

Taylor³

2012

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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There is now considerable evidence that a letter string can activate semantic information appropriate to its orthographic neighbors (e.g., Forster & Hector's, 2002, TURPLE effect). This phenomenon is the focus of the present research. Using Japanese words, we examined whether semantic activation of neighbors is driven directly by orthographic similarity alone or whether there is also a role for phonological similarity. In Experiment 1, using a relatedness judgment task in which a Kanji word-Katakana word pair was presented on each trial, an inhibitory effect was observed when the initial Kanji word was related to an orthographic and phonological neighbor of the Katakana word target but not when the initial Kanji word was related to a phonological but not orthographic neighbor of the Katakana word target. This result suggests that phonology plays little, if any, role in the activation of neighbors' semantics when reading familiar words. In Experiment 2, the targets were transcribed into Hiragana, a script they are typically not written in, requiring readers to engage in phonological coding. In that experiment, inhibitory effects were observed in both conditions. This result indicates that phonologically mediated semantic activation of neighbors will emerge when phonological processing is necessary in order to understand a written word (e.g., when that word is transcribed into an unfamiliar script).

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“…As shown in Table 1, the four prime types (i.e., match-related, match-control, mismatch-related, and mismatch-control) were matched on the following variables: (1) the number of morae, (2) word frequency counts (Amano & Kondo, 2003b), (3) orthographic familiarity ratings (Amano & Kondo, 2003a), (4) phonological familiarity ratings (Amano & Kondo, 2003a), (5) orthographic neighborhood sizes (calculated using a database from the National Language Research Institute, 1993), (6) summed character frequencies (calculated using Amano & Kondo, 2003b), (7) the number of strokes, and (8) orthography-to-phonology consistencies (based on Hino, Miyamura, & Lupker, 2011; all F s < 1.9)…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As shown in Table 6, the related and control primes were matched on the following variables (1) the numbers of morae, (2) word frequency counts (Amano & Kondo, 2003b), (3) orthographic familiarity ratings (Amano & Kondo, 2003a), (4) phonological familiarity ratings (Amano & Kondo, 2003a), (5) orthographic neighborhood sizes (calculated using a database from the National Language Research Institute, 1993), (6) summed character frequencies (calculated using Amano & Kondo, 2003b), (7) the numbers of strokes, and (8) orthographic–phonological consistencies (calculated based on Hino et al, 2011; all F s < 1.7). In addition, using the same procedure as in Experiments 1 and 2, the semantic relatedness ratings were also collected from another set of 26 participants who did not participate in Experiment 4.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The influence of orthography on speech production: Evidence from masked priming in word-naming and picture-naming tasks.

Yoshihara¹,

Nakayama

Verdonschot³

et al. 2020

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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In a masked priming word-naming task, a facilitation due to the initial-segmental sound overlap for 2-character kanji prime–target pairs was affected by certain orthographic properties (Yoshihara, Nakayama, Verdonschot, & Hino, 2017). That is, the facilitation that was due to the initial mora overlap occurred only when the mora was the whole pronunciation of their initial kanji characters (i.e., match pairs; e.g., 化石 /ka-se.ki/–火力 /ka-rjo.ku/). When the shared initial mora was only a part of the kanji characters’ readings, however, there was no facilitation (i.e., mismatch pairs; e.g., 発案 /ha.tu-a.N/–博物 /ha.ku-bu.tu/). In the present study, we used a masked priming picture-naming task to investigate whether the previous results were relevant only when the orthography of targets is visually presented. In Experiment 1, the main findings of our word-naming task were fully replicated in a picture-naming task. In Experiments 2 and 3, the absence of facilitation for the mismatch pairs were confirmed with a new set of stimuli. On the other hand, a significant facilitation was observed for the match pairs that shared the 2 initial morae (in Experiment 4), which was again consistent with the results of our word-naming study. These results suggest that the orthographic properties constrain the phonological expression of masked priming for kanji words across 2 tasks that are likely to differ in how phonology is retrieved. Specifically, we propose that orthography of a word is activated online and constrains the phonological encoding processes in these tasks.

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The nature of orthographic–phonological and orthographic–semantic relationships for Japanese kana and kanji words

Cited by 22 publications

References 25 publications

The multidimensionality of Japanese kanji abilities

The multidimensionality of Japanese kanji abilities

The role of orthography in the semantic activation of neighbors.

The influence of orthography on speech production: Evidence from masked priming in word-naming and picture-naming tasks.

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