Japanese Kanji Word Processing for Chinese Learners of Japanese: A Study of Homophonic and Semantic Primed Lexical Decision Tasks

The current study investigates phonological involvement in Japanese word recognition by advanced and intermediate Chinese learners. A homophonic, semantic and unrelated (control) primed lexical decision task was used to test the participants’ reactions times (RTs) and accuracy scores. Only the RTs of the participants’ accurate YES responses in the lexical decision task (yes/no) were used as dependent measures for evaluation. The results showed that there were no significant effects on priming types as well as proficiency levels. An analysis of the interaction also indicated no effects between priming effects and groups. That is, both the advanced learners and the intermediate learners performed similarly with all prime types. These results support the claim that the Universal Phonological Principle does not apply to Chinese readers when they encounter Japanese Kanji as they do not activate phonological representations while reading Japanese cognates. The present findings constitute a partial explanation of the word recognition process for Chinese learners of Japanese.