The Effects of a Sense of Compatibility between Type of Script and Word in Written Japanese.

Abstract

To examine the mechanism behind choice of script typein Japanese writing, four experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1-A, students evaluated Kanji, Hiraganaand Katakana semantic images using the word association method and in Experiment 1-B, subjects were given a semantic differential test of 21 adjective pairs. Theresults of both experiments showed that each script type possesses different semantic images. In Experiment 2, students listed famous people whose names are compatible with the semantic images associated with the Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana scripts. In Experiment 3, the effects associated with compatibility between mental representations of human names and semantic images of script type were investigated. The results showed that the script type compatible with the human name had a high probability of dictating the choice ofscript type in relation to how target words were written, i.e., Kanji-compatible personal names ledto a high choice rate of Kanji script when thetarget word was written down. Experiment 4 examined theeffect of mental associations connected with human nameson choice of script type by a short ISIcross-modal priming test paradigm. The resultssuggest that there are no implicit relationships betweensemantic images of script types and personal namesin Japanese writing.Based upon the results, two tentative cognitivemodels to explain how Japanese people select aparticular type of script from three types werehypothesized, and it was concluded that bothmodels can be applied, depending on the requiredtask.