The Japanese Journal of Psychology 1981, Vol. 52, No. 5, 266-273 Use of graphemic and phonemic encoding in reading Kanji and Kana Hirofumi Saito (Department of Psychology, School of Humanities, Gakuin University, Nishinomiya, 662) Kwansei Two experiments were conducted with Japanese subjects to investigate whether in reading Japanese phonological recoding is an obligatory stage or the direct access to semantic representa tion is the general rule. The first experiment used a word reading-out task and the second, a sentence judgement task. In the first experiment Kana (Japanese characters) were read out faster than Kanji (Chinese characters), but in the second experiment with the silent reading condition Kanji were judged faster than Kana. These results suggest that Kana is superior to Kanji in access to the phonemic codes, but this does not imply that the meaning is comprehended more rapidly in Kana. In contrast, Kanji takes longer for reading out (decoding) than Kana, but makes rapid access to semantic codes possible. This seems to indicate that in the silent reading of Kanji the direct proccessing from visual (graphemic) codes to meaning (semantic codes) is possible, whereas in Kana the relation of graphemic codes to meaning is mediated by the phone mic system. Key words: Kanji (Chinese characters), Kana (Japanese characters), reading task, phonemic encoding, graphemic encoding.
Table 1 Examples of the four script types used in Exp. T Fig. 1. Mean reaction times for the reading out task as a function of script type and number of Kana required to write.
Table 2 Mean reaction times (in ms) for the reading out tasks used in Exp. T and Exp. U (WPAR condition) as a function of script type Fig. 2. Chart of alloted times (s) used in Exp. U (SPSR: sentence preceding silent reading, SPAR: sentence preceding aural reading, WPSR: word preceding silent reading, WPAR: word pre ceding aural reading).
Fig. 3. Mean reaction times (positive judge ment results) for aural reading and silent reading conditions with the sentence judgement task as a function of script type.
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