The phonological unit of Japanese Kanji compounds: A masked priming investigation.

Abstract

Using the masked priming paradigm, we examined which phonological unit is used when naming Kanji compounds. Although the phonological unit in the Japanese language has been suggested to be the mora, Experiment 1 found no priming for mora-related Kanji prime-target pairs. In Experiment 2, significant priming was only found when Kanji pairs shared the of their initial Kanji characters. Nevertheless, when the same Kanji pairs used in Experiment 2 were transcribed into Kana, significant mora priming was observed in Experiment 3. In Experiment 4, matching the syllable structure and pitch-accent of the initial Kanji characters did not lead to mora priming, ruling out potential alternative explanations for the earlier absence of the effect. A significant mora priming effect was observed, however, when the shared initial mora constituted the whole sound of their initial Kanji characters in Experiments 5. Lastly, these results were replicated in Experiment 6. Overall, these results indicate that the phonological unit involved when naming Kanji compounds is not the mora but the whole sound of each Kanji character. We discuss how different phonological units may be involved when processing Kanji and Kana words as well as the implications for theories dealing with language production processes. (PsycINFO Database Record

Mora or more? The phonological unit of Japanese word production in the Stroop color naming task

“…The results for the kana distractors replicated Experiment 1 and previous findings of mora overlap effects found with the implicit priming procedure (Kureta et al, 2006) and the masked onset priming read-aloud experiments (Verdonschot et al, 2011). In contrast, the results for the kanji distractors stand in contrast to the results reported by Yoshihara et al (2017), particularly with respect to the fact that their multimoraic kanji stimuli did not show any mora priming in the masked priming read-aloud task. Before turning to a discussion of this dissociation, we note that here numerically the initial mora congruence effect was smaller for the kanji stimuli (34 ms) than the kana stimuli (48 ms), and the interaction with script type was statistically significant when the item and subject variability in the sensitivity to the congruence was disregarded.…”

“…The critical prediction concerned the kanji distractors. Recall that Yoshihara et al (2017) found no initial mora priming effect for two-character kanji words unless the whole pronunciation of the initial kanji character was the same in the prime and the target; kana transcription of the prime and target words restored the initial mora priming effect. If these results are due to the script-dependence of phonological unit of speech production, then similarly no initial mora congruence effect should be found in the present Stroop color naming task for the kanji distractors.…”

“…In Experiment 2, we manipulated script type within participants, and presented the kanji distractors and kana distractors in separate blocks, with the kanji block always presented first. This was done to adhere to the design of Yoshihara et al (2017) in which the script type was manipulated between experiments, and hence the kanji stimuli would not have been subject to carry over effects from the kana stimuli. In Experiment 3 we randomly mixed the kanji and kana distractors.…”

“…In fact, the original account of masked onset priming effect (Forster & Davis, 1991) and, later, the dual route cascaded (DRC) model of reading (e.g., Mousikou, Rastle, Besner, & Coltheart, 2015) situates its origin solely in print-to-sound mapping, prior to the phonological encoding process. Yoshihara et al (2017) thus noted that their finding Bdemonstrates that the difference in script type does matter at least when we read a word aloud,^(p.1303) leaving open the possibility that its effects may differ in other speech production tasks.…”

“…The question we ask is whether the mora-sized unit of speech production in Japanese is dependent on script type. The answer from a recent masked priming read-aloud study is positive (Yoshihara et al, 2017). However, the task here was to read aloud the target word, and it is unclear whether the influence of script type generalizes to other speech production tasks.…”