2012 Volume 11 Pages 1-9
The present study was designed to investigate how proficient Chinese learners of Japanese processed auditory-presented Kanji-words. In the experiment, the orthographic and phonological similarities between Chinese and Japanese were treated as independent variables, and the reaction times of the auditory lexical decision task were as dependent variables. The facilitatory effects of the orthographic similarity and the inhibition effects of the phonological similarity were observed in the reaction times. An analysis of the error rates of each conditions showed that fewer errors were observed for high orthographic and low phonological similarity Kanji-words. These results show a difference in the visual and auditory word recognition of Japanese Kanji-words. Both the orthographic representation and the phonological representation of Chinese are activated when Chinese learners of Japanese process Japanese Kanji-words. These results also suggest that in Japanese Kanji-words of high phonological similarity, the link from L2 phonological representation to conceptual representation is mediated by L1 phonological representation. Some educational implications were discussed based on these findings.
