The Effect of Morphemic Homophony on the Processing of Japanese Two-kanji Compound Words

Abstract

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 homophones led to faster lexical decision and whole-word naming. For right-hand kanji, the number of morphemic homophones did not affect either lexical decision or naming. This effect of homophonic density suggested that, when a kanji-compound word is to be processed, phonological information of its kanji constituents is automatically activated and reverberates back to generate a series of orthographic representations of kanji morphemic homophones, but not in a completely parallel fashion.

The Time-Course of Lexical Activation in Japanese Morphographic Word Recognition: Evidence for a Character-Driven Processing Model

“…The number of homophones of the right character slowed down responses as well (effect size = 53 ms), as expected. This finding contrasts with Tamaoka's (2005) observation of an inhibitory morphemic homophony effect for the left character only. This difference might be 4 The analysis of the subgaze counts indicates that this subset is biased slightly towards words preceded by trials with a short response latency, words responded to by readers who had only recently left Japan, words with fewer strokes, and words with higher frequencies.…”

“…Consistent with the analysis of response times ( Table 2, 53 ms), RightKanjiHomophones was inhibitory. Furthermore, there was a smaller faci litatory effect of LeftKanjiHomophones, which contrasted with the inhibitory effect of LeftKanji Homophones reported in Tamaoka's (2005) lexical decision study. This difference may be due to the different kinds of nonwords that we used, which included two-character words with illegal left characters.…”

“…Kawakami (2002) reported facilitation from the type frequency of characters in two-character word lexical decision. 2 In addition to character frequency effects, Tamaoka (2005) observed that larger numbers of homophones associated with the left character lead to longer response times in lexical decision and naming. Tamaoka and Hatsuzuka (1998, lexical decision and naming) further reported that semantic/conceptual properties of characters codetermine word recognition responses (cf.…”

“…As a consequence, the role of the right constituent as the head is more important in the present study. This morphemic homophony effect may reflect a rebounding effect of phonology to orthography (Pexman et al, 2001;Tamaoka, 2005Tamaoka, , 2007. Alternatively, it may reflect competition between different meanings associated with homophonic alternatives.…”

“…In order to assess phonological ambiguity and its effect on reading (Ferrand & Grainger, 2003;Pexman, Lupker, & Jared, 2001;Tamaoka, 2005), we made use of the log-transformed number of homophonous characters (LeftKanjiHomophones and RightKanjiHomophones). Tamaoka (2005) reported that words with a left character with …”