2000 Volume 20 Issue 2 Pages 108-114
Hino & Lupker (1998) examined word frequency effects for Japanese Kanji and Katakana words using naming, lexical decision, and go/no-go naming tasks. Whereas word frequency effect sizes were identical for Kanji and Katakana words in the lexical decision task, frequency effects were larger for Kanji words than for Katakana words in the naming task. In the go/no-go naming task, in which participants were asked to name a stimulus aloud only if it was a word, frequency effects were larger for Kanji words than for Katakana words as in the naming task and these effect sizes were larger than those in the lexical decision task. These results were consistent with the predictions based on parallel distributed processing model in which identical phonological coding processes are assumed for Kanji and Katakana words. As such, these results appear to indicate that phonological coding for Kanji and Kana words is accomplished based on similar operations.
