Katsuo Tamaoka

Frequency of occurrence for units of phonemes, morae, and syllables appearing in a lexical corpus of a Japanese newspaper

On the basis of the lexical corpus created by Amano and Kondo (2000), using theAsahi newspaper, the present study provides frequencies of occurrence for units of Japanese phonemes, morae, and syllables. Among the five vowels, /a/ (23.42%), /i/ (21.54%), /u/ (23.47%), and /o/ (20.63%) showed similar frequency rates, whereas /e/ (10.94%) was less frequent. Among the 12 consonants, /k/ (17.24%), /t/ (15.53%), and /r/ (13.11%) were used often, whereas /p/ (0.60%) and /b/ (2.43%) appeared far less frequently. Among the contracted sounds, /sj/ (36.44%) showed the highest frequency, whereas /mj/ (0.27%) rarely appeared. Among the five long vowels, /ar/ (34.4%) was used most frequently, whereas /ur/ (12.11%) was not used so often. The special sound /n/ appeared very frequently in Japanese. The syllable combination /k/+V+/n/ (19.91%) appeared most frequently among syllabic combinations with the nasal /n/. The geminate (or voiceless obstruent) /q/, when placed before the four consonants /p/, /t/, /k/, and /s/, appeared 98.87% of the time, but the remaining 1.13% did not follow the definition. The special sounds /r/, /n/, and /q/ seem to appear very frequently in Japanese, suggesting that they are notspecial in terms of frequency counts. The present study further calculated frequencies for the 33 newly and officially listed morae/syllables, which are used particularly for describing alphabetic loanwords. In addition, the top 20 bi-mora frequency combinations are reported. Files of frequency indexes may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society Web archive athttp://www.psychonomic.org/archive/.

The Functional Unit of Japanese Word Naming: Evidence From Masked Priming

Theories of language production generally describe the segment as the basic unit in phonological encoding (e.g., Dell, 1988; Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999). However, there is also evidence that such a unit might be language specific. Chen, Chen, and Dell (2002), for instance, found no effect of single segments when using a preparation paradigm. To shed more light on the functional unit of phonological encoding in Japanese, a language often described as being mora based, we report the results of 4 experiments using word reading tasks and masked priming. Experiment 1 demonstrated using Japanese kana script that primes, which overlapped in the whole mora with target words, sped up word reading latencies but not when just the onset overlapped. Experiments 2 and 3 investigated a possible role of script by using combinations of romaji (Romanized Japanese) and hiragana; again, facilitation effects were found only when the whole mora and not the onset segment overlapped. Experiment 4 distinguished mora priming from syllable priming and revealed that the mora priming effects obtained in the first 3 experiments are also obtained when a mora is part of a syllable. Again, no priming effect was found for single segments. Our findings suggest that the mora and not the segment (phoneme) is the basic functional phonological unit in Japanese language production planning.

A Web-accessible database of characteristics of the 1,945 basic Japanese kanji.

In 1981, the Japanese government published a list of the 1,945 basic Japanese kanji (Jooyoo Kanjihyo), including specifications of pronunciation. This list was established as the standard for kanji usage in print. The database for 1,945 basic Japanese kanji provides 30 cells that explain in detail the various characteristics of kanji. Means, standard deviations, distributions, and information related to previous research concerning these kanji are provided in this paper. The database is saved as a Microsoft Excel 2000 file for Windows. This kanji database is accessible on the Web site of the Oxford Text Archive, Oxford University (http://ota.ahds.ac.uk). Using this database, researchers and educators will be able to conduct planned experiments and organize classroom instruction on the basis of the known characteristics of selected kanji.

Cognitive processing of Chinese characters, words, sentences and Japanese kanji and kana: An introduction

Over the past fifty years or so the process-oriented approach has been used to explore the general properties of language systems within the framework of human cognition (Alegria, Holender, Morais & Radeau 1992). While much of this work in information processing deals with the English language, there is increasing realization that we need to understand better the similarities and differences in processing lexical items in different alphabetic language systems and also non-alphabetic systems such as Chinese and Japanese (Frost & Katz 1992).

The Proximate Phonological Unit of Chinese-English Bilinguals: Proficiency Matters

An essential step to create phonology according to the language production model by Levelt, Roelofs and Meyer is to assemble phonemes into a metrical frame. However, recently, it has been proposed that different languages may rely on different grain sizes of phonological units to construct phonology. For instance, it has been proposed that, instead of phonemes, Mandarin Chinese uses syllables and Japanese uses moras to fill the metrical frame. In this study, we used a masked priming-naming task to investigate how bilinguals assemble their phonology for each language when the two languages differ in grain size. Highly proficient Mandarin Chinese-English bilinguals showed a significant masked onset priming effect in English (L2), and a significant masked syllabic priming effect in Mandarin Chinese (L1). These results suggest that their proximate unit is phonemic in L2 (English), and that bilinguals may use different phonological units depending on the language that is being processed. Additionally, under some conditions, a significant sub-syllabic priming effect was observed even in Mandarin Chinese, which indicates that L2 phonology exerts influences on L1 target processing as a consequence of having a good command of English.

Homophonic and semantic priming of Japanese kanji words: A time course study

In an examination of the time course of activation of phonological and semantic information in processing kanji script, two lexical decision experiments were conducted with native readers of Japanese. Kanji targets were preceded at short (85-msec) and long (150-msec) intervals by homophonic, semantically related, or unrelated primes presented in kanji (Experiment 1) or by hiragana transcriptions of the kanji primes (Experiment 2). When primes were in kanji, semantic relatedness facilitated kanji target recognition at both intervals but homophonic relatedness did not. When primes were in hiragana, kanji target recognition was facilitated by homophonic relatedness at both intervals and by semantic relatedness only at the longer interval. The absence of homophonic priming of kanji targets by kanji primes challenges the universal phonology principle’s claim that phonology is central to accessing meaning from print. The stimuli used in the present study may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.

Use of phonological information in processing kanji and katakana by skilled and less skilled Japanese readers

The study examined in the biscriptal Japanese orthography if phonological processing may accompany accurate and rapid visual recognition of single kanji characters according to their semantic or phonetic constituent elements, and high- and low-frequency katakana words. The subjects consisted of 108 grades 4, 5, and 6 Japanese children dichotomized into skilled and less skilled readers. The concurrent articulation interference paradigm was used while the subjects were making the lexicality decisions. The results suggest that visual-phonetic recoding may be possible in accessing difficult kanji characters with phonetic elements; and that phonological processing may vary according to the frequency of the katakana words. Further, younger children and less skilled readers are less efficient in their maintenance of the phonological code in processing the kanji and kana lexical items.

The effects of morphological semantics on the processing of Japanese two-kanji compound words

The present study investigated the way in which the activation of semantic representations at the morpheme level affects the processing of two-kanji (morpheme) compound words. Three types of Japanese two-kanji compound words were used as stimulus items: (1) words consisting of two kanji representing opposite concepts (e.g., long + short = length), (2) words consisting of two kanji representing similar concepts (e.g., soft + flexible = pliable), and (3) control words consisting of two closely bound kanji (e.g., wild + field = wilderness). Words consisting of kanji of opposite concepts (M = 768 ms for LD and M = 645 ms for naming) were processed more slowly for lexical decision, but not for naming, than words with kanji of similar concepts (M = 743 ms for LD and M = 636 ms for naming), both of which were, furthermore, processed more slowly for lexical decision and naming than the control compound words (M = 716 ms for LD and M = 590 ms for naming). These results were explained in the framework of the multiple-level interactive-activation model as follows. Because kanji morphemes of opposite and similar concepts are semantically activated both as morpheme units and compound word units, semantic representations of the two morphemes and the compound word which they create compete with each other at the concept level, which slows down lexical decision and naming of the compound word.

Factor Structure of Japanese Versions of Two Emotional Intelligence Scales

This article reports the psychometric properties of two emotional intelligence measures translated into Japanese. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was conducted to examine the factor structure of a Japanese version of the Wong and Law Emotional Intelligence Scale (WLEIS) completed by 310 Japanese university students. A second study employed CFA to examine the factor structure of a Japanese version of the Schutte Emotional Intelligence Scale (SEIS) completed by 200 Japanese university students drawn from the first study. A four-factor model was replicated for both the WLEIS and for the SEIS. Structural equation modeling indicated that higher WLEIS and SEIS scores were related to higher self-reported satisfaction with life.

Psycholinguistic Evidence for the VP-Internal Subject Position in Japanese

The question of whether the subject stays in its thematic position within the VP or moves to Spec, TP is difficult to answer with respect to free word order languages such as Japanese because the surface constituent orders in these languages do not necessarily provide sufficient information to determine syntactic positions. In this article, we present psycholinguistic evidence for the theoretical hypothesis that, in Japanese, the subject must move to Spec, TP in sentences with the subject-objectverb word order, but may stay within the VP in sentences with the object-subject-verb word order.