Individual differences in the integration of information from context and word parts in interpreting unknown kanji words

Abstract

This study examines individual differences in the ability to integrate information from word parts and context in interpreting novel kanji compounds (i.e., words consisting of two or more Chinese characters). To account for different approaches that students take to infer the meanings of unfamiliar words, the study also investigates the relationship between students' beliefs about the effectiveness of using kanji and/or contextual clues and their abilities to use the clue(s). A total of 74 English-speaking college students learning Japanese inferred the meanings of unknown compounds consisting of familiar characters under three conditions (words in isolation, contextual clues only, and both). The effects of the two sources appeared additive when examined across all participants. Further analysis, however, indicated that nearly half the students did not combine the two sources and overrelied on either kanji or contextual clues. The inability to integrate information and overreliance on kanji clues modestly but statistically significantly correlated with belief in the efficacy of an integration strategy. The combined effect of multiple sources of information, therefore, must be interpreted in terms of individual differences.

How Do English L1 Learners of Advanced Japanese Infer Unknown Kanji Words in Authentic Texts?

“…In other words, the students knew the individual kanji characters used in the target kanji words, but not the target words. 2 Mori (2002a) further investigated the inability to integrate internal and external information and suggested that the inability to integrate information from two sources was correlated with the students' belief in the efficacy of an integration strategy. 3 With the phonographic writing system, the basic unit of representation is a phoneme, a sound unit (e.g., kana in Japanese, English alphabet), whereas with the morphographic writing system, the basic unit is a morpheme that represents a meaning (e.g., Chinese characters).…”

Relationship between types of distractor and difficulty of multiple-choice vocabulary tests in sentential context

“…However, a series of studies by Mori (1999;2002;Mori & Nagy, 1999) produced different results from those of Pike (1979) and Henning (1991). She used Japanese vocabulary tests and compared three conditions: kanji only, context only, and kanji and context.…”

Review of recent research (2000–2010) on learning and instruction with specific reference to L2 Japanese

“…2003a). At the same time, students show considerable individual differences in the way they learn new kanji words (Kubota & Toyoda 2001;Y. Mori 2002).…”