CHAPTER 1 - ASPECTS OF THE JAPANESE WRITING SYSTEM RELEVANT TO NEUROLINGUISTIC RESEARCH

Abstract

A superficial reading of the literature on dissociations between performance with kanji and kana characters in Japanese alexic patients may lead the non-Japanese reader to assume that there are two writing systems in Japanese, one syllabic and the other ideographic, and that some patients selectively lose access to one or the other. This chapter describes the interpretation of two script types, namely, kana and kanji, which are used in systematic combinations in sentences. A kanji is a graphic symbol representing a lexical morpheme with no systematic relationship to the corresponding spoken sounds, each morpheme being represented by a specifically shaped character. A kana is a character that stands for a syllable. The Japanese speaker uses one writing system that integrates these two types of script, and this property of the system poses large number of serious problems when the performance of two scripts are compared. A major consequence of this system is that when one tries to compare performance on kanji stimuli and kana stimuli, there is an unavoidable part-of-speech effect, because kanji characters in isolation are used to represent nouns whereas kana characters are used to represent grammatical morphemes. To overcome this difficulty, performance on nouns written with a kanji can be compared with performance on nouns written with kana characters. However, this leads to additional difficulties such as length-of-grapheme-representation effect, strangeness effect for stimuli and semantic-category effect. In general, the sole dimension considered as a factor in differential performance with respect to the two Japanese writing systems has been based upon a distinction between the phonemic and visual dimension. Differences in performance have been attributed to differences in visual processing for kanji and phonological processing for kana.