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.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.