The present study investigated the effects of visual complexity for kanji processing by selecting target kanji from different stroke ranges of visually simple (2-6 strokes), medium (8-12 strokes), and complex (14-20 strokes) kanji with high and low frequencies. A kanji lexical decision task in Experiment 1 and a kanji naming task in Experiment 2…

Japanese kanji reading can be divided into two types: "On"-readings, derived from the original Chinese pronunciation and "Kun"-readings, originating from the Japanese pronunciation. Kanji that are normally given an "On"-reading around 50% of the time were presented in a context of other kanji that had either a highly dominant "On"-reading or a…

The present study investigated the effects of lexical homophony on the processing of Japanese two-kanji compound words. Experiment 1 showed that participants took longer to perform lexical decisions for words with a high degree of lexical homophony than those with no homophony. Interestingly, the same inhibitory trend was found in the naming task…

Two experiments investigated the effect of kanji morphemic homophony on lexical decision and naming. Effects were examined from both the left-hand and right-hand positions of Japanese two-kanji compound words. The number of homophones affected the processing of compound words in the same way for both tasks. For left-hand kanji, fewer morphemic…

Presents 3 experiments that examine whether Japanese readers activate phonological information when reading kanji compound words and sentences and if so, how they do it. Suggests that readers activate phonological information of two-kanji compound words when reading for comprehension but not for simple proofreading. (SG)

Offers an introduction to this themed journal issue dealing with the cognitive processing of the Chinese and the Japanese languages. Discusses processing Chinese, processing Japanese, and research needs. (SR)

Finds that, because kanji morphemes of opposite and similar concepts are semantically activated both as morpheme units and compound-word units, semantic representations of the two morphemes and the compound word which they create compete with each other at the concept level, which slows down lexical decision and naming of the compound word. (SR)

Examines if phonological processing in biscriptal Japanese orthography may accompany accurate, rapid visual recognition of single "kanji" characters according to semantic/phonetic constituent elements, and high- and low-frequency "katakana" words. Suggests that visual-phonetic recoding may be possible in accessing difficult kanji characters with…