Abstract
This study investigated the effects of subjective frequencies of written forms on the word reading time of aphasic patients. Participants in the study included 10 nonfluent type and 10 fluent type aphasic patients. Sets of 15 kanji-type words (words written frequently in kanji but rarely in hiragana) and 15 hiragana-type words (words written frequently in hiragana but rarely in kanji), chosen based on a study by Ukita et al. (1991 a), were presented to the patients in both kanji and hiragana (total of 60 words), and they were required to read aloud each word as quickly as possible. Patients were found to read aloud kanji-type words faster when presented in kanji than when given in hiragana, and to read aloud hiragana-type words faster when presented in hiragana than when given in kanji. Also, when words were presented in hiragana, hiragana-type words were found to be read faster than kanji-type words. These results suggest that hiragana-type words presented in hiragana are read not letter-by-letter but as a whole unit, and that subjective frequencies of written forms are critical when considering the processing differences between script types in Japanese.
