Do Japanese EFL learners activate phonology in reading

Kadota, S. and Ishikawa, K. 2005. Do Japanese
EFL Learners Activate Phonology in Reading
English Words and Japanese Kanji?
JACET Bulletin 40: 55-75.
Do Japanese EFL learners activate phonology in reading
English words and Japanese kanji?
KADOTA, Shuhei
Kwansei Gakuin University
ISHIKAWA, Keiichi
Kyoto Women’s University
ABSTRACT
This article explores whether or not there is further support for ‘the dual access model’ of the word
meaning access, and if so, examines what relationship can be assumed between the two processing
routes (i.e., phonology-mediated versus visual) of the model. In the two experiments to be reported,
Japanese university students were required to make semantic and phonological decisions for English
and Japanese kanji word pairs presented simultaneously on the computer monitor.
Though the
overall results suggest the plausibility of the above dual processing routes, the present study may also
postulates ‘a universal activation-dominance hypothesis’ of the model, the verification of which seems
to be an important next step for the future research.
INTRODUCTION
It has been an issue of great theoretical interest whether processing printed
words involves the phonological recoding of the visual form or is possible directly
from the visual orthographic representation (Taft, 1991). So far three hypotheses
have been proposed on this subject-matter (Perfetti, 1999): (1) universal direct
access hypothesis, (2) orthographic depth hypothesis, (3) universal phonology
principle. The universal direct access hypothesis suggests that the access to word
meaning is possible silently without phonological recoding in all the languages of the
world. According to the orthographic depth hypothesis, the orthographic depth (i.e.,
the degree of consistency in grapheme-phoneme correspondences) determines the
relevance of phonological activation in the processing of word meanings. In the
shallow orthographic systems (e.g., Spanish, German) where there is supposed to be
one-to-one correspondences between graphemes (G) and phonemes (P), the
phonological representations easily obtained through the GP converting rules is
indispensable for the meaning access. On the other hand, the meaning access in
languages which have little or no regularity in the GP relationships is achieved
without activating the phonological representation which is eventually obtained after
lexical access. Finally the universal phonology principle hypothesizes that the
lexical phonological representation is the inevitable prerequisite for the meaning
access.
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Kadota, S. and Ishikawa, K. 2005. Do Japanese
EFL Learners Activate Phonology in Reading
English Words and Japanese Kanji?
JACET Bulletin 40: 55-75.
DUAL ACCESS MODEL TO WORD MEANING: L1 RESEARCH
In contrast with the above three hypotheses, Kadota (1998b, 2002) postulates ‘a
dual access model’ in which the two processing routes (i.e., phonological Route A
and visual Route B) are simultaneously activated more or less in the access to word
meaning (See Figure 1).
Semantic
Representation
R oute A
R oute B
Orthographic
Representation
Phonological
Representation
Visual Input
!!
Figure 1. Dual Access Model to Word Meaning (Kadota, 1998b, 2002)
The plausibility of the above dual access model is shown by combining the
empirical data in the past works in experimental psychology and in some relevant
studies in the field of cognitive neuropsychology of written language processing.
In the former paradigm, a number of empirical studies seem to support the
phonology-mediated view of word meaning access. van Orden (1987) provided a
semantic categolization judgment task in which subjects were visually presented first
with a category name as a prime word (e.g., FLOWER), and then with a correct
target word (e.g., ROSE) or a incorrect homophone target word (e.g., ROWS) or
control target word (e.g., ROBS). The subjects’ task was to make a semantic
judgment as to whether the target word (e.g., ROSE or ROWS) belongs to the
categorical prime noun (e.g., FLOWER). In fact, van Orden found that homophone
target words produced significantly more errors than control target words, which can
be interpreted as showing that the errors were indeed due to homophony, and that
phonological representation occurs prelexically before the word meaning access and
activates all of the possible meanings (e.g., ROWS, ROSE).
Lesch and Pollatsek (1993), using the same prime-target method, displayed the
target word (e.g., sand) and assigned the naming (i.e., reading aloud) task of the
word after one of the following prime words: a correct associate (e.g., BEACH), a
homophone (e.g., BEECH), orthographically similar word (e.g., BENCH), and control
word (e.g., FLUID). It was found that naming latency of the target word is much
accelerated by the homophone prime word as well as by a correct associate, but that
this finding was true only at a short exposure duration (i.e. 50ms) of the prime word,
but not at a long exposure duration (i.e. 200ms). The results provide evidence for
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Kadota, S. and Ishikawa, K. 2005. Do Japanese
EFL Learners Activate Phonology in Reading
English Words and Japanese Kanji?
JACET Bulletin 40: 55-75.
phonological activation prior to word meaning access, and suggest that phonological
representation is formed prelexically at a short time duration like 50ms.
On the other hand, neuropsychological studies on language processing,
particularly on Japanese kanji-kana processing, suggest the existence of a nonphonological, visual route to word meaning access. Japanese writing system
consists of an ideographic kanji which roughly corresponds to a lexical morpheme of
a spoken Japanese, and a kana which is used to represent a mora or a syllable of
short duration. Thus it is generally believed that while kana stimuli involve
phonological coding, processing kanji characters can be done directly from visual
input, and some of the past empirical studies do offer evidence supporting this idea.
Morikawa (1981), for instance, in his research on the strategies for processing
kanji, used the task of ‘Stroop Interference'; naming ink colors of stimuli, in which
conflicting color words are printed (e.g., red in green ink), takes longer than naming
ink colors of solid color words (e.g., red in red ink). He reports that Japanese
subjects show much greater interference for naming ink colors of kanji Stroop stimuli
than of kana Stroop stimuli. Similarly, Kaiho and Nomura (1983) compared naming
times for words transcribed in kana (e.g., !", #$%&), and the same words
written in kanji (e.g., ', ()). The results were that two character kana words
were named significantly faster than four character kana words, but that there was no
difference in naming latencies between one and two character kanji words.
Based upon the assumption that stimuli seen in the right visual-field (RVF) of
each eye project to the left hemisphere (LH), and vice versa, there are a number of
tachistoscopic studies on hemispheric specialization of visually presented kanji.
According to Taylor and Taylor (1983), it is known that single kanji characters, at
least for simple recognition, show a left visual field (LVF) advantage (i.e., the right
hemisphere (RH) processing) and thus are perceived as a holistic visual pattern.
(See also Paradis, Hagiwara, and Hildebrandt, 1985 for a summary of clinical case
reports dealing with brain damaged patients.)
However, it has been indicated by some researchers that the deeper, more
cognitive level of processing kanji characters in a working memory does require an
activation of the phonological representation. Hatta (1979), for instance, conducted
a laterality experiment, and concludes that there is a strong tendency toward a RVF
advantage (i.e., LH processing), when the task given is to judge whether the kanji
(e.g., * [right]+, [left]) appear in the semantically congruent side of the visual
field.
In a short-term store experiment by Erickson, Mattingly, and Turvey (1977),
it is shown that when pairs of characters in a silently read kanji list are homophonous,
the subjects' (i.e., Japanese, Chinese, and Korean) recall was significantly poorer
than when the list included no such pairs.
The dual access model outlined above is in part supported by these cognitive
neuropsychological studies of written language processing, and corresponds to a
neuropsychological model of reading and writing proposed by Iwata (1996).
According to the model, the signals received at the primary visual areas in the
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Kadota, S. and Ishikawa, K. 2005. Do Japanese
EFL Learners Activate Phonology in Reading
English Words and Japanese Kanji?
JACET Bulletin 40: 55-75.
occipital lobe are hypothesized to have two pathways: (a) One route is to transmit the
signals to the angular gyrus, where they are recoded into auditory representations,
which are then perceived by the Wernicke’s area, a region in the posterior temporal
lobe of the left hemisphere involved in the understanding of spoken language, (b)
The other is to send the signals directly to the Wernicke’s area via temporal posterior
region. While the channel (a) is the phonology-mediated processing route which
was originally proposed by Geschwind (1979) and others, the second channel (b) is
dominantly used in reading Japanese kanji words. It is reported by many aphasic
studies concerning Japanese language-disorder patients that the selective
impairments of understanding the meaning of kanji characters in Japanese are often
due to the damage of the temporal posterior region in LH, which then maintains the
presence of visual, direct (b) channel.
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"A: Wernicke’s area, S: Somatic motor area, V: Visual area, AG: Angular gyrus, T: Posterior inferior
temporal area#
Figure 2. Iwata’s Neuropsychological Model of Reading and Writing (Iwata, 1996)
L2 ACCESS RESEARCH
Kadota (1998a) investigated the relevance of phonological representation in word
meaning access by providing Japanese university students learning English as a
foreign language with an interfering task of ‘subvocal rehearsal suppression in the
phonological loop’; the subjects were required to repeat seven unrelated numbers
subvocally while they are engaged in the main tasks of syntactic (i.e., lexical category,
e.g., read-forget <yes>, alike-apple <no>), semantic (i.e., synonym, e.g., area-region
<yes>, shine-draw <no>) and phonological (i.e., homophone, e.g., wait-weight <yes>,
meal-mile <no>) decisions on a pair of English words simultaneously displayed to a
computer monitor. The reaction latencies in the decision tasks with and without
interference were compared to ascertain the effect on the performance. The major
results were as follows (See Figure 3 below):
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Kadota, S. and Ishikawa, K. 2005. Do Japanese
EFL Learners Activate Phonology in Reading
English Words and Japanese Kanji?
JACET Bulletin 40: 55-75.
(1) The phonological decision on English word pairs tends to be made faster than the
semantic decision, which again is faster than the syntactic decision (See also Kadota,
1998b).
(2) While the subvocal interference task delayed significantly the phonological
decision on word pairs, the same suppression did not affect the semantic decision
task at all.
Thus the major conclusions of interest were that although the access to the
phonological representations of printed English words are fast and automatic in
nature, the phonological recoding is not indispensable for the English lexical access
to the semantic representation in L2.
2900
2800
2700
2600
(
'*
2500
2400
(
')
2300
2200
2100
2000
1900
!"#$ %
!"#$ &
!"#$ '
!Task L (Lexical): Syntactic Decision, Task M (Meaning): Semantic Decision, Task P (Phonological):
Phonological Decision, PU (Phonology Unrestrained): Without-Phonological Interference Condition, PR
(Phonology Restrained): With-Phonological Interference Condition"
Figure 3. Mean Reaction Times (msec.) for the Syntactic, Semantic, and
Phonological Decisions with or without Phonology Interference (Kadota, 1998b)
In the next experiment by Kadota and Ishikawa (2000), the semantic (i.e.,
synonym) decisions on homophone English word pairs (e.g., site-sight, meet-meat
<no>) was shown to be much faster than control (e.g., school-impact, cent-east
<no>) and synonym (e.g., occur-happen, mend-repair <yes>) word pairs, whereas
there was a significant delay of reaction latency as to the phonological judgments of
homophone pairs (e.g., write-right, route-root <yes>) in comparison with control (e.g.,
cruel-pure, apply-admit <no>) and synonym word pairs (e.g., construct-build, jobwork <no>). The main conclusion of interest here was that the direct visual
processing route to English word meaning is to be activated when the identical
phonological representations obtained from the homophone pairs give no useful
clues to the processing of the printed words.
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Kadota, S. and Ishikawa, K. 2005. Do Japanese
EFL Learners Activate Phonology in Reading
English Words and Japanese Kanji?
JACET Bulletin 40: 55-75.
1800
1700
1600
1500
1400
1300
1200
1100
1000
900
800
Controls
Homophones
Sy nony m
Semantic Decision
Phonological Decision
Figure 4. Mean Reaction Times (msec.) for the Semantic and Phonological Decisions
on Control, Homophone, and Synonym English Word Pairs
(Kadota and Ishikawa, 2000)
In brief, our past empirical works are consistent in providing evidence in the
following points:
(1) Access to the phonological representation of English printed words is faster than
the semantic access and is automatic in nature for Japanese EFL students.
(2) The more direct orthography-to-meaning route (Route B) can be activated and
employed when the phonology-mediated route (Route A) to semantic representation
of English words is blocked and do not provide any useful information.
Thus our past empirical works seem to support ‘the dual access model’ of English
lexical access which comprises both phonological and visual processing routes to
word semantics.
EXPERIMENT 1
Experiment 1 is in part a replication of Kadota’s (1998a) subvocal rehearsal
interference study, but this time an experiment was conducted for Japanese kanji
word pairs as well as for English word pairs. The purposes of Experiment 1 are:
(1) To determine which lexical information (i.e., meaning and phonology) is more
easily and automatically retrieved as to visually displayed English and Japanese
Kanji words.
(2) To examine whether suppressing phonological activation interferes in the access
to semantic representations of English and Japanese kanji words.
Method and Procedure
The subjects were 73 Japanese university students leaning English as a foreign
language, 36 being given English pairs and 37 being provided with Japanese kanji
pairs. All of them were students of non-English (i.e. law) majors and were in the
freshman class of English writing using computers and internet.
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Kadota, S. and Ishikawa, K. 2005. Do Japanese
EFL Learners Activate Phonology in Reading
English Words and Japanese Kanji?
JACET Bulletin 40: 55-75.
The task assigned to the subjects was basically to judge whether two
simultaneously presented words on a computer monitor were synonyms or not in the
semantic decision, and homophones or not in the phonological decision.
A set of 48 English word pairs were selected from JACET BASIC WORDS,published by Japan Association of College English Teachers (JACET), exactly
matching the frequency levels (1 to 5) indicated in the booklet, which were divided
into two types of 24-pair lists for semantic and phonological decision tasks. As to
Japanese kanji, a total of 96 word pairs, which were selected from Words and Letters
in Present-day 90 Magazines ( . / 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 6 8 ), published by The
National Language Research Institute in Japan, were also divided into two types of
48-pair list, statistically equalizing the frequency per a million words (F=0.004, ns.).
The followings are the examples (See Appendix A and B):
9English Pairs:
(1) Pairs for synonym decision task: mistake-error <yes>, trip-travel <yes>, remainlisten <no>, etc.
(2) Pairs for homophone decision task: fair-fare <yes>, mail-male <yes>, steamstorm <no>, etc.
9Kanji Pairs:
(1) Pairs for synonym decision task: ;<-=> <yes>, ?@-AB <yes>, CD-EF
<no>, etc.
(2) Pairs for homophone decision task: GH-IJ <yes>, KL-MN <yes>, OP-Q
R <no>, etc.
There were two conditions in performing the decision tasks: (a) phonologyunrestrained (PU) condition, and (b) phonology-restrained (PR) condition. The
normal PU condition is the one which has no additional interference task. On the
contrary, in the latter PR condition, the subjects were required to rehearse subvocally
the pre-displayed seven random digits in the phonological loop of a working memory
while they were engaged in decision tasks. The task was assumed to interfere with
the phonological activation of the visually presented words, and was named ‘a
subvocal rehearsal suppression’.
The experiment was conducted in the multimedia room with 48 notebook
computers (i.e., Apple Powerbook). Each trial was initiated by the appearance of ‘+’
(2 seconds) which served as an attention point, and a pair of words appeared
simultaneously on the computer monitor. Subjects were required to judge whether
the two words presented were synonyms or not in the semantic decision, or
homophones or not in the phonological decision. They indicated their response by
pressing one of the two response keys (i.e. b <yes> and n <no>) using their righthand two fingers. They were instructed to make their decision as quickly and as
accurately as possible, and did not receive any feedback as to the correctness of
their responses except for the practice session (4 trials for each session). A
questionnaire on the handedness was conducted before the experiment and all the
subjects with left-handedness were excluded from the analysis.
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Kadota, S. and Ishikawa, K. 2005. Do Japanese
EFL Learners Activate Phonology in Reading
English Words and Japanese Kanji?
JACET Bulletin 40: 55-75.
Results and Discussion
Table 1 and Figure 5 below show the mean RTs (msec.) in the semantic and
phonological decision tasks under PU and PR conditions for English word pairs:
Condition
PU
PR
Task
Semantic Phonological Semantic Phonological
Number
36
36
36
36
Mean (ms.)
2176
1902
2298
2168
S.D.
660.31
644.57
584.69
769.30
Table 1. The Effect of Restrained Phonology (PR) on Processing Visually Presented
RT
ms
.
2400
2300
2200
PU
2100
PR
2000
1900
1800
Phonological
Semantic
English Words
Figure5. The Effect of Restrained Phonology (PR) on Processing Visually Presented
English Words
There were significant main effects of task, F=7.128 (p<.015), and of condition,
F=6.786 (p<.02) in RT data. The results of multiple comparisons showed that, while
there was no significant difference between semantic and phonological decisions in
PR condition, in normal PU condition the phonological decisions were much faster
than semantic decision (p<.001). It was also found that the subvocal rehearsal
suppression delayed the RTs in the phonological decision tasks, whereas the same
interference task did not affect the semantic judgment tasks to the level of statistical
significance.
In the following Table 2 and Figure 6 are shown the mean RTs (msec.) in the
semantic and phonological decision tasks under PU and PR conditions for Japanese
kanji word pairs:
Condition
Task
PU
PR
Semantic Phonological Semantic Phonological
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Kadota, S. and Ishikawa, K. 2005. Do Japanese
EFL Learners Activate Phonology in Reading
English Words and Japanese Kanji?
JACET Bulletin 40: 55-75.
Number
Mean (ms.)
S.D.
37
996
118.98
37
963
128.39
37
1060
253.53
37
1015
232.60
Table 2. The Effect of Restrained Phonology (PR) on Processing Visually
Presented Japanese Kanji
1100
1080
1060
1040
1020
/ 0 PU
1000
/ 0 PR
980
960
940
920
900
+,-
+,.
Figure 6. The Effect of Restrained Phonology (PR) on Processing Visually Presented
Japanese Kanji
There were no clear significant main effects of task and condition, though we
acknowledge the tendencies toward significance (task: F=3.191, .05<p<.083, ns.;
condition: F=4.029, .05<p<.053). However, the results of multiple comparisons
revealed that, unlike English word pairs, kanji word pairs did not produce any
significant difference of RTs between semantic and phonological decision tasks in
PU as well as in PR. It was also discovered that the RTs in semantic and
phonological decisions are much delayed by the additional task of subvocal rehearsal
suppression.
As a whole, the major conclusions of the present experiment are as follows:
(1) The assessment of homophones (i.e. phonological decision) for English word
pairs was made significantly faster than that of synonyms (i.e. semantic decision),
which confirms the data reported by Kadota (1998a).
(2) On the contrary, there was no difference of RTs between semantic and
phonological judgments of Japanese Kanji words.
(3) While the subvocal interference task did not affect semantic judgment of English
word pairs, for Japanese Kanji word pairs the same suppression did delay semantic
decisions.
Overall, it seems that the access to phonological representation is fast and
automatic but is not obligatory for meaning access as to English printed words,
whereas for Japanese kanji words the phonological activation may be a prerequisite
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Kadota, S. and Ishikawa, K. 2005. Do Japanese
EFL Learners Activate Phonology in Reading
English Words and Japanese Kanji?
JACET Bulletin 40: 55-75.
for their meaning access. Thus the data appear to be consistent with the hypothesis
that there are dual access routes to lexical semantics.
EXPERIMENT 2
The conclusion that orthography-to-meaning route (Route B) can be activated and
used possibly as part of the conscious strategy does not necessarily suggest that
there is no activated phonological representation in the word meaning access. It is
equally possible that, when the phonological representation is easily obtained without
any interference, phonology-mediated process (Route A) is usually the more
preferred channel of the two. Since an access to English word phonology is already
shown to be automatic in nature, there may be the case that the automatically
activated phonological representation will cause the delay of word meaning
processing. In fact, Lesch and Pollatsek (1998), in a priming experiment, examined
the effects of homophone prime words (e.g., BEECH) and false-homophone prime
words (e.g., BEAD) of the true associate prime word (e.g., BEACH, BED
respectively) on the semantic relatedness judgment with the target words (e.g.,
SAND, PILLOW). A false-homophone here was a word that was not a homophone
but that could be pronounced like the true associate word by the assembled type of
phonological coding (e.g., HEAD, BREAD, DEAD) (See also Kadota, 2002). What
they found was that participants took longer and made more errors in homophone
and false-homophone conditions than in any other condition, and this suggested to
them that phonology occurs prelexically in an assembled fashion before word
meaning access.
Our purpose here is to investigate whether printed homophone word pairs can
cause the delay of reaction latencies and the increase of errors in the semantic
relatedness judgment task of the English and Japanese Kanji word pairs. The
method adopted, however, was not the priming but, like Experiment 1, the
simultaneous presentation of a pair of printed words in English and Japanese kanji.
By doing so, we attempted to gain evidence as to whether phonological activation is
central and dominant, or plays a minor back-up role, in the process of word meaning
access in L2 English and L1 Japanese kanji.
Method and Procedure
A total of 36 Japanese university students learning English as FL participated in
Experiment 2. Like Experiment 1, all of them were students of law majors and were
in the freshman English writing class.
The task given here was the semantic relatedness decision, i.e., to judge whether
two simultaneously displayed words were semantically related or not. A set of 48
English word pairs were selected from JACET BASIC WORDS and were divided into
four types of 12-pair lists, and a total of 72 Japanese kanji word pairs were selected
from Words and Letters in Present-day 90 Magazines and were divided into three
types of 24-pair list, controlling the frequency levels or the frequency per a million
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Kadota, S. and Ishikawa, K. 2005. Do Japanese
EFL Learners Activate Phonology in Reading
English Words and Japanese Kanji?
JACET Bulletin 40: 55-75.
words like Experiment 1. The followings are the example pairs (See also Appendix
C):
9English Pairs:
(1) Appropriate pairs:
toll-fare, entire-whole, etc.
(2) Homophone pairs:
toll-fair, entire-hole, etc.
(3) Visually similar pairs: Just one letter was replaced or added from the true
associate word.
toll-fire, entire-while, etc.
(4) Different target pairs:
toll-jump, entire-daddy, etc.
9Kanji Pairs:
(1) Appropriate pairs:
ST-UV, WX-YZ, etc.
(2) Homophone pairs
ST-[\, WX-]^, etc.
(3) Different target pairs:
ST-_L, WX-`a, etc.
For example, the subjects were instructed to respond ‘yes’ when presented with the
word pair ‘entire-whole’ and ‘no’ with the pairs ‘entire-hole’, ’entire-while’, ’entiredaddy’ in English. In Japanese they were to respond similarly ‘yes’ with the pair ‘W
X-YZ’ and ‘no’ with the pairs ‘WX-]^’, ’WX-`a’.
As with Experiment 1, this experiment was also done in the multimedia room
using Apple Powerbooks, and the procedure was basically the same: each trial was
initiated by two-second ‘+’ attention sign, and then a pair of words were displayed
simultaneously on the monitor. The decision task here was, however, to judge
whether or not the two words presented vertically were semantically related in some
way by pressing one of the two keys (i.e. b <yes> and n <no>). The decisions were
also instructed to be made as quickly and as accurately as possible, and before the
experiment were given the questionnaire on the handedness and the practice
session consisting of 10 trials.
Results and Discussion: English
Two sets of data were analyzed: reaction time (RT) and the number of error
responses.
Table 3 and Figure 7 represents Mean RTs (ms) in the semantic
relatedness judgment task as a function of stimulus pair type:
Appropriate Homophone Visually similar Different Target
Number
36
36
36
36
Mean (ms.)
2110
2504
2309
2019
902.3
929.3
929.7
627.7
S.D.
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Kadota, S. and Ishikawa, K. 2005. Do Japanese
EFL Learners Activate Phonology in Reading
English Words and Japanese Kanji?
JACET Bulletin 40: 55-75.
Table 3. Mean RTs (ms) in the Semantic Relatedness Judgement Task as a Function
of Stimulus Pair Type: English Words
2600
2400
2200
2000
1800
1600
1400
1200
Appropriate
Homopho Visually Similar
Word Type
Different Target
Figure 7. Mean RTs (ms) in the Semantic Relatedness Judgement Task as a
Function of Stimulus Pair Type: English Words
There was a significant main effect of stimulus type in the mean RT data, F=3.757
(p<.015). Analyses of multiple comparisons revealed that homophone condition
was significantly slower than appropriate condition (p<.015) and different target
condition (p<.003).
The mean error response data were reported in the next Table 4 and Figure 8:
Number
Mean
S.D.
Appropriate Homophone Visually similar Different Target
36
36
36
36
0.722
1.306
0.611
0.556
0.615
0.577
0.766
0.652
Table 4. Mean Response Errors in the Semantic Relatedness Judgement Task as a
Function of Stimulus Pair Type: English Words
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Kadota, S. and Ishikawa, K. 2005. Do Japanese
EFL Learners Activate Phonology in Reading
English Words and Japanese Kanji?
JACET Bulletin 40: 55-75.
2
1.8
1.6
1.4
1.2
1
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0
Appropriate
Homophone Visually Similar
Word Type
Different Target
Figure 8. Mean Response Errors in the Semantic Relatedness Judgement Task as a
Function of Stimulus Pair Type: English Words
It was found that there was also a significant main effect of stimulus type, F=9.108
(p<.001). The homophone condition produced significantly more errors than
appropriate condition (p<.001), visually similar condition (p<.001), and different target
condition (p<.001).
These comparisons indicate that the phonological representation of the
homophone significantly delayed the judgment with ‘no (b-key)’ response in
comparison with appropriate and different target conditions, and made the task more
difficult than appropriate, visually similar and different target conditions. It was also
discovered that there was no significant difference between visually similar condition
and appropriate / different target conditions. The results suggest that (1) subjects
tended to take longer and significantly made more errors in the homophone condition
than in any other condition, due to the phonological identity to the true appropriate
words, and (2) the visual similarity of the word to the true appropriate word had no
effect on the judgment of semantic relatedness.
Results and Discussion: Japanese Kanji
Mean RT and error response data were also analyzed for Japanese kanji word
pairs. In Table 5 and Figure 9 are shown the RTs (ms) in the semantic relatedness
judgment task as a function of stimulus pair type:
Number
Mean
S.D.
Appropriate Homophone Different Target
36
36
36
1288
1436
1379
343.8
535.2
450.8
Table 5. Mean RTs (ms) in the Semantic Relatedness Judgement Task as a Function
of Stimulus Pair Type: Japanese Kanji Words
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"!#%!"!
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Kadota, S. and Ishikawa, K. 2005. Do Japanese
EFL Learners Activate Phonology in Reading
English Words and Japanese Kanji?
JACET Bulletin 40: 55-75.
2600
2400
2200
2000
1800
1600
1400
1200
Homophone
Appropriat
Different Target
Word Type
Figure 9. Mean RTs (ms) in the Semantic Relatedness Judgement Task as a
Function of Stimulus Pair Type: Japanese Kanji Words
As to Japanese kanji words, there was also a significant main effect of stimulus
type in the mean RTs, F=5.169 (p<.009). It was found by multiple comparisons that
homophone condition took significantly longer than appropriate condition (p<.003),
but that there was no significant difference between homophone condition and
different target condition.
Table 6 and Figure 10 stand for the response errors in the semantic relatedness
judgment task as a function of stimulus pair type:
N
Mean
S.D.
Appropriate Homophone Different Target
36
36
36
0.472
1.083
0.361
0.654
1.131
0.683
Table 6. Mean Response Errors in the Semantic Relatedness Judgement Task as a
Function of Stimulus Pair Type: Japanese Kanji Words
2
1.8
1.6
1.4
1.2
1
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0
Appropriate
Homophone
Different Target
Word Type
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"!#&!"!
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Kadota, S. and Ishikawa, K. 2005. Do Japanese
EFL Learners Activate Phonology in Reading
English Words and Japanese Kanji?
JACET Bulletin 40: 55-75.
Figure 10. Mean Response Errors in the Semantic Relatedness Judgement Task as
a Function of Stimulus Pair Type: Japanese Kanji Words
The analysis of the error response data disclosed that there was a significant
main effect of stimulus type, F=7.760 (p<.001). The number of errors was
significantly larger in the homophone condition than in appropriate condition (p<.003)
and different target condition (p<.001).
Thus the error data on kanji word pairs suggest that the phonological
representation of the homophones significantly made it difficult to make a ‘no’
decision and caused more incorrect responses than appropriate and different target
conditions, which indicates that homophone kanji pairs were incorrectly judged as
semantically related words because of the phonologically identical representations to
the true appropriate words. Although there was no significant RT difference
between homophone and different target conditions, which may indicate the
possibility that the appropriate-homophone discrepancy is just due to the difference
of yes-no response modes, it seems that, together with the results of error
performance, the present analysis confirms a similar homophone effect on the
processing of printed kanji words.
As a rule, the findings of the present experiment can be summarized as follows:
(1) As for English word decisions, subjects take longer and significantly make more
errors in the homophone condition than in any other condition, due to the
phonological identity to the true appropriate words
(2) The visual similarity factor of the English word to the true appropriate word has no
effect on the judgment of semantic relatedness.
(3) As to Japanese kanji words, homophone pairs tended to be incorrectly judged as
semantically related words because of the phonologically identical representations to
the true appropriate words.
Thus Experiment 2 in the present article reveals that there is a clear homophone
interference in the access to the word meaning both in English and in Japanese kanji.
This suggests that phonological coding or constructing phonological representation is
the inevitable, automatic prerequisite for the access to lexical meaning representation
in English as well as in Japanese kanji.
GENERAL DISCUSSION
Experiment 1 of the present article shows that the access to the phonological
representation of the English word which is automatic in nature is not obligatory for
its meaning access, since the direct, visual route to word semantics can be activated
and give compensation for the lack of processing when the phonology-mediated
access route is suppressed. On the contrary, the results of our Experiment 2 reveal
that if the phonological coding is not blocked by an additional interference task, it is
an inevitable, automatic process in the word meaning access. When the findings in
the two experiments are combined, the logical and natural consequence is to assume
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"!#'!"!
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Kadota, S. and Ishikawa, K. 2005. Do Japanese
EFL Learners Activate Phonology in Reading
English Words and Japanese Kanji?
JACET Bulletin 40: 55-75.
that the word phonological representation, when it is not suppressed and available
for the readers, is the automatic prelexical step for the access to lexical meaning
representation in English and Japanese kanji.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
As far as the dual access model described above in the present article is
concerned, the conclusions of the two experiments make us postulate ‘a universal
activation-dominance hypothesis’ of the dual processing routes, i.e., in any language
of the world there is an unmarked preference order of the phonology-mediated route
(Route A) over direct, non-phonological route (Route B), which, in principle, serves a
secondary and compensatory function in the processing of word semantics.
While one of the courses for the future research perspectives is clearly the
verification of this activation dominance hypothesis, we also need to examine the
nature of phonological coding for visually presented words, namely the issue of
assembled vs. addressed phonological coding. Taft (1991), in the discussion of his
multiple-levels model, a subset of a version of the so-called ‘interactive-activation
model’, notes the role of orthographic body in the phonological coding of printed
words.
Figure 11. A Multiple-Levels Model (Taft, 1991: 81)
As has been often discussed in some of the recent L1 lexical access studies, if the
phonological representation is formed in an assembled rather than an addressed (i.e.,
whole-word) fashion (See for instance Lesch and Pollatsek, 1998 above), the next
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"!#(!"!
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Kadota, S. and Ishikawa, K. 2005. Do Japanese
EFL Learners Activate Phonology in Reading
English Words and Japanese Kanji?
JACET Bulletin 40: 55-75.
research step is to determine the basic unit of phonological coding. Now there are
three possible candidates: (1) a grapheme unit based upon the use of graphemephoneme conversion rules, (2) a letter cluster unit which phonologically corresponds
to phoneme cluster, and (3) a body unit (i.e., a word-final multi-letter pattern), such as
–EAN in CLEAN, DEAN, MEAN, etc. with a consistent pronunciation / i:n / or -EAT in
TREAT, THREAT, etc. with a inconsistent pronunciation / i:t / / et /. An answer for
this question seems to provide promising big strides for the future.
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE
Shuhei Kadota, Department of Law and Graduate School of Language, Communication and Culture,
Kwansei Gakuin University, 1-155 Uegaharaichiban-cho, Nishinomiya, 662-8501, Japan.
E-mail:
[email protected]
!
REFERENCES
Erickson, D., I. G. Mattingly, and Turvey, M. T. (1977) Phonetic activity in reading: An experiment
with kanji. Language and Speech 20: 384-403.
Geschwind, N. (1979) Specializations of the human brain. In A Scientific American Book: The Brain,
pp. 108-117. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company.
Hatta, T. (1979) Hemisphere asymmetries for physical and semantic congruency matching of visually
presented kanji stimuli. Japanese Journal of Psychology 50: 273-277.
Iwata, M. (1996) Brain and language: Neuro-mechanism of language [Noh to kotoba: Gengo no
shinkei kikoh]. Tokyo: Kyoritsu Shuppan.
Kadota, S. (1998a) The role of phonology in the visual cognition of English words: An psycholinguistic
research [Eitango no shikakuteiji ni okeru on-in no yakuwari: shinrigenngogakuteki bunseki].
The Usage and Grammar of Present-day English, pp.317-325. Tokyo: Taishukan.
Kadota, S. (1998b) A study on the relation judgement as to visually presented English word pairs:
Analyses of correct responses and reaction latencies [Shikaku teiji sareta eitango pair no kankei
handan: seitouritu-hannoujikan ni yoru kentou].
Studies in Foreign Languages and Cultures
(Kwansei Gakuin University) 11: 205-220.
Kadota, S. (2002) How phonology works in L2 reading comprehension [Eigo no kakikotoba to
hanashikotoba wa ikani kankei shiteiruka: Daini gengo rikai no ninchi mekanizumu.] Tokyo:
Kuroshio-Shuppan.
Kadota, S. and Ishikawa, K. (2000) The effects of homophone and synonym word pairs on the visual
cognition of English and Japanese kanji words [Eitango-kanjitango no shikaku ninti ni okeru
doonigigo pair oyobi ruigigo pair no eikyo]. Journal of the Japan Society of Speech Sciences 1:
51-66.
Kaiho, H. and Nomura, Y. (1983) Psychology of kanji processing [Kanji Johoshori no Shinrigaku].
Tokyo: Kyoiku Shuppan.
Lesch, M. F. and Pollatsek, A. (1993) Automatic access of semantic information by phonological
codes in visual word recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology 19: 285-294.
Lesch, M. F. and Pollatsek, A. (1998) Evidence for the use of assembled phonology in accessing the
meaning of printed words.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and
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"!#)!"!
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Kadota, S. and Ishikawa, K. 2005. Do Japanese
EFL Learners Activate Phonology in Reading
English Words and Japanese Kanji?
JACET Bulletin 40: 55-75.
Cognition 24: 573-592.
Morikawa, Y. (1981) Stroop phenomena in the Japanese language: The case of ideographic
charactyers (kanji) and syllabic characters (kana). Perceptual and Motor Skills 53: 67-77.
Paradis, M., Hagiwara, H., and Hildebrandt, N. (1985) Neurolinguistic aspects of the Japanese writing
system. New York: Academic Press.
Perfetti, C. A. (1999) The cognitive science of word reading: What has been learned from comparisons
across weiting systems?
A Lecture Delivered at the 2nd International Conference on
Cognitive Science and the 16th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Cognitive Science Society
Joint Conference. Tokyo: Waseda University.
Taft, M. (1991) Reading and the mental lexicon.
Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates.
Taylor, I. and Taylor, M. M. (1983) The psychology of reading. New York: Academic Press.
van Orden, G. C. (1987) A ROWS is a ROSE: Spelling, sound, and reading. Memory and Cognition
15: 181-198.
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"!#*!"!
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Kadota, S. and Ishikawa, K. 2005. Do Japanese
EFL Learners Activate Phonology in Reading
English Words and Japanese Kanji?
JACET Bulletin 40: 55-75.
APPENDIX A
English word pairs used in Experiment 1
*Italicized pairs are for ‘no’ judgment.
< Semantic Decision >
steam storm
mass math
firm
fame
hole
dear
sail
peace
tail
waist
hang
save
print
tool
dish
width
Practice Session
gentle
difficult
obtain
acquire
hobby
nylon
laugh
laughter
Experimental Session
F-Level
area
region b c
size
volume c d
author
writer d d
perform fulfill
de
attempt try
db
mistake error
df
woman process b c
century cousin c d
shine
draw
db
apart
enemy d d
disease culture d f
dare
mere
de
F-Level
trip
travel c b
danger risk
df
allow
permit c d
response answer d b
bill
account d d
shortage lack
ed
remain listen c b
waiter
whale c d
motion table
db
sheep
district d d
nature
clerk
df
cancer chair
ed
whole
deer
sale
piece
tale
waste
white
sand
point
tube
dash
worth
d d
d f
d e
F-Level
c b
d f
c d
d b
d d
e d
c
c
d
d
d
e
b
d
b
d
f
d
APPENDIX B
Japanese Kanji Word Pairs Used
n Experiment 1
*Italicized pairs are for ‘no’ judgment.
< Semantic Decision >
Practice Session
Frequency Frequency
68
557
gh ij
30
48
kl mn
25
34
op qU
18
rs tu
32
228
vw xy
Experimental Session
Frequency Frequency
21
23
z{ |}
265
78
~• €•
44
27
‚ƒ „…
27
21
†‡ ˆ‰
25
48
Š‹ Œ•
18
37
Ž• •‘
37
48
;< =>
132
228
Z’ “”
349
116
•– —˜
27
46
™P š›
52
41
œ• —ž
59
27
Ÿ
¡¢
66
37
£( ¤¥
34
37
¦§ ¨©
41
34
ª« ¬37
37
P› ®¯
187
187
°± ²³
37
39
´µ ¶·
21
55
¸x ¹–
333
183
º» ¼½
21
27
¾x ¿À
46
167
YÁ ÂÃ
Phonological Decision >
Practice Session
miner
minor
colonel
kernel
hot
hut
series
serious
Experimental Session
F-Level
wait
weight b c
sight site
c d
steal steel
d d
fair
fare
d e
meat meet
d b
mail
male
d f
word wonder b c
share shot
c d
meal mile
d b
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Kadota, S. and Ishikawa, K. 2005. Do Japanese
EFL Learners Activate Phonology in Reading
English Words and Japanese Kanji?
JACET Bulletin 40: 55-75.
ÄÅ
Ç;
37
46
16
32
Frequency
121
34
48
32
48
55
16
208
30
123
18
41
39
34
18
265
59
94
68
23
114
23
110
37
48.00
74.02
81.60
Frequency
98
78
27
107
50
62
71
89
126
25
39
46
354
44
41
71
142
91
55
27
68
34
112
18
‰Æ
ÈÉ
List A
No. of Words
Mean
SD
ÊË
Ìj
ÎÏ
ÒÓ
6<
_Í
ÐÑ
ÔÕ
ÖÓ
ÙÚ
ÜA
×Ø
Û×
(T
?@
ÝÞ
AB
ßà
CD
áâ
äå
EF
ã–
æç
èÕ
éê
ëì
ïð
íî
ñò
óô
ö÷
ùú
xõ
øL
ûõ
.ü
ýþ
çh
ÿò
!"
#$
%&
'(
)à
"*
+,
-Q
List B
No. of Words
Mean
SD
LM
GH
NO
IJ
PQ
RS
<†
VW
TU
X@
Y•
[\
^_
Z(
]à
`a
bc
dù
ef
í?
gh
Gk
ij
lS
mn
op
qr
£t
es
<Á
OP
uv
QR
wx
Üá y<
List A
No. of Words
Mean
SD
48.00
73.60
64.54
ANOVA
F=0.004 p=1.000
< Phonological Decision >
Practice Session
Frequency Frequency
16
27
./ ;0
62
55
12 34
23
34
56 7Œ
30
21
89 :3
37
226
iZ ;6
lz
{|
~Ã
y)
}Û
•ø
€•
J•
_•
‚ƒ
÷„
¶…
ˆP
(Õ
£Õ
†‡
‰Š
‹h
Mó
Œô
<Ú
•Ž
••
KL
‘õ
MN
’“
”•
.9
–—
˜™
š›
N’
œ•
Gž
ÅŸ
IÕ
Q
I¡
_L
¢j
£Ü
UV
¤¥
[\
¦§
C¨
<1
List B
No. of Words
Mean
SD
Experimental Session
Frequency Frequency
98
96
`a <=
25
27
3M >?
221
50
@A CB
116
132
CD E§
96
68
FG HŽ
91
78
æI JK
!
!
!
"!$2!"!
25
34
62
21
32
87
57
148
189
126
55
41
48
23
75
96
59
119
41
34
153
75
18
57
142
50
25
89
23
44
201
32
91
71
25
30
48.00
74.92
50.11
Frequency Frequency
94
21
157
130
98
169
64
78
23
48
30
105
64
91
87
48
71
96
55
41
185
55
48
46
21
75
48
48
46
25
96
59
68
84
32
48
23
64
71
68
103
199
82
44
55
59
64
196
48.00
74.63
44.44
!
Kadota, S. and Ishikawa, K. 2005. Do Japanese
EFL Learners Activate Phonology in Reading
English Words and Japanese Kanji?
JACET Bulletin 40: 55-75.
APPENDIX C
Word pairs used in the Experiment 2
(English Words)
Semantic associate Appropriate Homophone Visually similar Different target
deal
sell
cell
seal
bird
drift
sail
sale
soil
much
entire
whole
hole
while
daddy
hide
bury
berry
busy
tank
letter
mail
male
main
bush
moon
sun
son
sin
car
naked
bare
bear
bake
tool
spell
write
right
white
comma
stop
wait
weight
want
full
strong
weak
week
wear
film
toll
fare
fair
fire
jump
view
sight
site
slight
carry
(Japanese Kanji Words)
Semantic associate Appropriate Homophone Different target
WX
YZ
]^
`a
©ª
@A
CB
CD
u«
Ï¬
-ð
FG
®¯
;6
iZ
æI
°¢
ž±
²’
PQ
ý³
´µ
¶·
Y•
RS
bc
dù
[\
¸¹
ºF
€~
^_
à
<†
TU
ef
»¼
½¾
¿À
mn
ÒÁ
£t
<Á
OP
Â]
Üá
y<
uv
/6
lz
y)
€•
rP
{|
}Û
÷„
êÃ
~Ã
•ø
¶…
ÄÅ
ÆÇ
ÈÕ
ˆP
ÉÊ
ËÌ
.ü
(Õ
ÍÎ
ÏÛ
Ð|
<Ú
Ñ<
KL
MN
”•
ÒÓ
_N
Ôú
˜™
•Õ
Ö˜
)à
š›
ÌP
×Ø
Í0
I¡
ST
UV
[\
_L
ÙÚ
¤¥
¦§
C¨
!
!
!
!
"!$#!"!
!

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