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

Abstract

a b s t r a c tThe process of reading aloud bare nouns in alphabetic languages is immune to semantic context effects from pictures. This is accounted for by assuming that words in alphabetic languages can be read aloud relatively fast through a sub-lexical grapheme-phoneme conversion (GPC) route or by a direct route from orthography to word form. We examined semantic context effects in a word-naming task in two languages with logographic scripts for which GPC cannot be applied: Japanese kanji and Chinese hànzì. We showed that reading aloud bare nouns is sensitive to semantically related context pictures in Japanese, but not in Chinese. The difference between these two languages is attributed to processing costs caused by multiple pronunciations for Japanese kanji.

Homophonic Context Effects when Naming Japanese Kanji: Evidence for Processing Costs?

“…As mentioned earlier, Verdonschot et al (2010) obtained facilitation effects from semantically related pictures compared to unrelated pictures when naming Japanese kanji but not when naming Chinese hànzì. If this effect originates from the fact that Japanese kanji is read through the direct Figure 2.…”

“…However, for Japanese the story becomes different. In this case, we propose that naming Japanese kanji also proceeds via the direct lexical-phonological level; however, the fact that multiple pronunciations are activated (due to kanji heterophony) causes a processing cost, which in turn leads to the same susceptibility to context effects as observed (for semantic context) in Verdonschot et al (2010). Therefore, we hypothesize that introducing homophonic context pictures in our experiments should give rise to different effects for Japanese (Experiment 1) and Chinese (Experiment 2).…”

“…Reading bare words in alphabetic languages has been shown to be rather immune to effects of context stimuli, even when these stimuli are presented in advance of the target word (e.g., Glaser & Düngelhoff, 1984;Roelofs, 2003). However, recently, semantic context effects of distractor pictures on the naming latencies of Japanese kanji (but not Chinese hànzì) words have been observed (Verdonschot, La Heij, & Schiller, 2010). In the present study, we further investigated this issue using phonologically related (i.e., homophonic) context pictures when naming target words in either Chinese or Japanese.…”

“…In their study, Verdonschot et al (2010) combined kanji targets with semantically related and unrelated context pictures and found that at two stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs) of 0 ms (simultaneous presentation) and -150 ms (context picture first), semantically related distractor pictures shortened word-naming latencies. This result is at variance with both the lack of a picture-context effect in reading Chinese characters and the lack of picture-context effects in naming words in alphabetic languages discussed above (Glaser & Düngelhoff, 1984;Roelofs, 2003Roelofs, , 2006.…”

“…Recently, Verdonschot, La Heij, and Schiller (2010) investigated semantic context effects of pictures on naming Japanese kanji and Chinese hànzì words. Japanese kanji form a unique set of words in that over 60% are homographic heterophones, meaning that most kanji have at least two different pronunciations (or readings).…”