Mechanisms of Japanese and English Lexical Information Processing and Language Learning

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Three items of information at the lexical level, orthography, phonology, and meaning, are entwined in a complicated manner. The goal of this study is to reveal some aspects of lexical information processing in written Japanese. Six topics have been dealt with. First, lexical decision latencies were measured for two-character words and nonwords in kanji, and the effect of valence was observed. Second, event-related potentials were measured for high-and low-frequency kanji characters, and N400 was found for high-frequency meaningful characters. Third, a time course for meaning and phonology was investigated, using naming latencies for kanji and kana. Fourth, the Yamazaki et al.'s (1997) data for naming latencies were reanalyzed in terms of ease of acquisition. Fifth, the National Language Institute's (1988) data were reanalyzed, focusing on error patterns for middle and high school students. Finally, naming latencies were compared between kanji with two readings and those with one reading.