Www.kanjidatabase.com: a new interactive online database for psychological and linguistic research on Japanese kanji and their compound words.

Abstract

Most experimental research making use of the Japanese language has involved the 1945 officially standardized kanji (Japanese logographic characters) in the Jōyō kanji list (originally announced by the Japanese government in 1981). However, this list was extensively modified in 2010: five kanji were removed and 196 kanji were added; the latest revision of the list now has a total of 2136 kanji. Using an up-to-date corpus consisting of 11years' worth of articles printed in the Mainichi Newspaper (2000-2010), we have constructed two novel databases that can be used in psychological research using the Japanese language: (1) a database containing a wide variety of properties on the latest 2136 Jōyō kanji, and (2) a novel database containing 27,950 two-kanji compound words (or jukugo). Based on these two databases, we have created an interactive website ( www.kanjidatabase.com ) to retrieve and store linguistic information to be used in psychological and linguistic experiments. The present paper reports the most important characteristics for the new databases, as well as their value for experimental psychological and linguistic research.