Effects of First Language and Phonological Accessibility on Kanji Recognition

Abstract

This study examines the transfer of learners' first language (L1) orthographic processing strategies to second language (L2) processing. Two groups of college students learning Japanese, a group of learners whose L1 writing system is phonographic and another group whose L1 employs a morphographic writing system, were tested on their ability to represent novel kanji characters in short‐term memory. For students in the phonographic language background group, phonologically accessible characters (i.e., characters whose inner radical was a pronounceable katakana character) were easier to remember than phonologically inaccessible characters (i.e., characters whose inner radical was not pronounceable). In contrast, the absence of the pronounceable elements in the stimuli did not hinder the memory performance of the morphographic language background group. This interaction between L1 background and the phonological inaccessibility of stimuli is interpreted as showing that, due to their L1 experience, L2 learners from a morphographic language background use more flexible strategies for phonological decoding for new characters than learners from a phonographic language background.