Phonetic Coding of Kanji

Abstract

An experiment in the recall of visually presented Japanese Kanji ideograms suggest that Kanji may, like alphabetic words, be encoded phonetically, despite their lack of phonetic structure. The experiment, based on Kintsch's and Buschke's (1969) paradigm, assumed that similarity of items in a list increased errors in recall. Four lists were prepared, each containing 16 different Kanji. The first included phonetically similar pairs of characters; the second, semantically similar pairs; the third, visually similar pairs; the fourth was a control list containing no similar pairs. The subjects, 10 native speakers of Japanese, were presented with randomly ordered versions of each list, at one character per second. After a subject had seen an entire list, he was presented with a cue character selected from the list, and asked to recall the character that had been presented immediately before the cue. Confusion in recall was significantly greater for the phonetic list than for the other lists. These results strengthen the hypothesis that regardless of structure, visually presented linguistic items are, like speech itself, phonetically processed.