Kanji words are easier to identify than katakana words (original) (raw)
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Alphabetic letter identification: Effects of perceivability, similarity, and bias
Acta Psychologica
The legibility of the letters in the Latin alphabet has been measured numerous times since the beginning of experimental psychology. To identify the theoretical mechanisms attributed to letter identification, we report a comprehensive review of literature, spanning more than a century. This review revealed that identification accuracy has frequently been attributed to a subset of three common sources: perceivability, bias, and similarity. However, simultaneous estimates of these values have rarely (if ever) been performed. We present the results of two new experiments which allow for the simultaneous estimation of these factors, and examine how the shape of a visual mask impacts each of them, as inferred through a new statistical model. Results showed that the shape and identity of the mask impacted the inferred perceivability, bias, and similarity space of a letter set, but that there were aspects of similarity that were robust to the choice of mask. The results illustrate how the psychological concepts of perceivability, bias, and similarity can be estimated simultaneously, and how each make powerful contributions to visual letter identification.
The Effects of Visual Complexity for Japanese Kanji Processing with High and Low Frequencies
Reading and Writing an Interdisciplinary Journal, 2013
The present study investigated the effects of visual complexity for kanji processing by selecting target kanji from different stroke ranges of visually simple (2-6 strokes), medium (8-12 strokes), and complex (14-20 strokes) kanji with high and low frequencies. A kanji lexical decision task in Experiment 1 and a kanji naming task in Experiment 2 were administered to native Japanese speakers. Results of both experiments showed that visual complexity inhibited the processing of lowfrequency kanji, whereas such consistent, inhibitory effects of visual complexity were not observed in the processing of high-frequency kanji. Kanji with medium complexity were processed faster than simple and complex kanji in high frequency.
Reading and Writing, 1995
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 t08 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.
Form and sound similarity effects in kanji recognition
1998
Four experiments are reported here to address the question of whether figurative and phonological processing based on sub-word components (radicals) interact in the recognition of Japanese kanji characters. A delayed matching task was used in which two briefly exposed 'source' characters (e.g.,), each made up by two radicals, were followed by a probe character (e.g.,) which in critical conditions was different from the source characters. The task of the subject was to decide whether the probe was one of the two source characters. When a probe was figuratively similar to the source display, the homophonic relatedness between source and probe characters elicited more false responses to the probe. However, no homophony effect was found when the probe was dissimilar to the source display. Further, the false alarm rates in the homophone condition with figurative similarity was shown to be sensitive to proportion of homophonous trials in negative sets. The results suggest that phonological information of both whole character and of components was automatically activated despite experimental tasks in which subjects were given little incentive to execute phonetic processing. It is concluded that the interaction of figurative and phonological processing is due to mutual activation of the whole character and its radical(s) in the process of word identification in kanji. The results are considered within an interactive-activation framework with fore-and background activation device in multilevels.
A phoneme effect in visual word recognition
Cognition, 1998
In alphabetic writing systems like English or French, many words are composed of more letters than phonemes (e.g. BEACH is composed of five letters and three phonemes, i.e. /biJ/). This is due to the presence of higher order graphemes, that is, groups of letters that map into a single phoneme (e.g. EA and CH in BEACH map into the single phonemes /i/ and /J/, respectively). The present study investigated the potential role of these subsyllabic components for the visual recognition of words in a perceptual identification task. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the number of phonemes in monosyllabic, low frequency, five-letter, English words, and found that identification times were longer for words with a small number of phonemes than for words with a large number of phonemes. In Experiment 2, this 'phoneme effect' was replicated in French for low frequency, but not for high frequency, monosyllabic words. These results suggest that subsyllabic components, also referred to as functional orthographic units, play a crucial role as elementary building blocks of visual word recognition.
abstract One of the problems of Amharic orthography is a lack of consistency where the four Amharic sounds (/h/, /ʔ/, /s/ and /s'/) are mapped onto more than a single letter. The objective of these psychological experiments was to investigate the visual recognition of the graphic variants of the letters, both in isolation and within words. The experiments involved computation of the frequency counts of the letters in the Ten Ten Corpus for Amharic and the result revealed that there is a clear pattern of preference for the letters: the letters representing /h/ had the pattern <ሀ> <ሐ> <ኀ> , the letters representing /ʔ/ had the pattern <አ> <ዐ> , the letters representing /s/ had the pattern <ሰ> <ሠ> , and the letters representing /s'/ had the pattern <ጸ> <ፀ> in descending order of frequency. Similarly, the experiments indicated that frequency counts are significantly related to visual recognition of a letter, with the more frequent letters recognized faster with fewer errors. It was also observed that the target letters were recognized with a shorter reaction time when they were paired with themselves, but the recognition time was longer when they occurred with their graphic variants. Moreover, significantly higher percentage of errors were made when the target letters were matched with their graphic variants or their distractors in the alphabet recognition task. Similar patterns were also observed in the lexical decision task when the target letters were presented in words and pseudo-words. More rigorous psycholinguis-tic experiments, which will involve a large number of participants, are recommended to validate the results of the current experiments. [1] introduction There is a large body of empirical evidence which shows that letters constitute the smallest perceptual units in visual recognition of words (Fiset et al. 2008). For instance, Pelli et al. (2003) reported that a word cannot be read if its letters are not separately decoded. Employing a masking technique, they observed that the stimulus energy for the recognition of a word is directly related to the number of letters. Similarly, Martelli, Majaj & Pelli (2005) found that word
Script-based cues in identification
Acta Psychologica, 1987
We describe here four experiments which deal with the contrast between two methods of investigating memory for prior episodes: perceptual identification and recognition. 'Ibis work extends earlier models of word identification following word lists and single sentences to identification and recognition of words following processing of naturally occurring discourse. In experiment 1 subjects read five passages containing typical and atypical actions within an everyday script; subjects were tested immediately for recogn&ion of words selected from typical and atypical actions. Discriminabihty was better for atyp@ words that had been seen than for .typical words. In experiment 2 identification of the same words exposed for brief duration was required. Words related to both typical and atypical events were identified equally well and both more accurately than new unrelated words.
Character recognition among English- speaking L2 readers of Japanese
The present study investigated the development of semantic processing skills in character recognition among English-speaking L2 readers of Japanese with different levels of knowledge of kanji (the morphographic script used in the Japanese writing system) by using a timed semantic processing task (a task involving the comparison of kanji). By analysing the results of the task (correct response rates and reaction times), the study described the changes in semantic processing skills at the different stages of knowledge of kanji. The overall findings of the study suggest that 1) L2 readers with different levels of target script knowledge approach the recognition of characters differently, and that 2) L2 semantic processing skills approximate those of L1 readers with increased L2 script knowledge.