日本語への近似度を異にする文字系列の認知と記憶についてII

附 近似英語に対する日本人学生の認知

抄録

This report contains three experimental studies.
The first experimental study was planned and undertaken as the continuation of the previous report. Now we changed the length of stimulus series, and the subjects on the experiment of tachistoscopic identification were university students, while the subjects on the experiment of memory were middle school students. As a result of this study, previous conclusions were verified in spite of the change of the length of stimulus series.
In the second study, pseudo-English was used to clarify the nature of recognition of verbal materials. The subjects were the Japanese students studying English as a foreign language. The findings obtained were as follows:
(1) The recognition of pseudo-English, though the language was graded according to the order of approximation to English, gave no differences corresponding to such grades when compared with the subjects who use Englih as their mother language.
(2) With the same Japanese students, the length of the period they had learned English had an influence on the recognition of the pseudo-English.
(3) Japanese students, even if they had difficulty in a foreign language, could recognize their mother language according to the order of approximation to Japanese. Therefore, the important factor in recognition according to the order of approximation to language was whether they had learned and become familiar with it or not.
In the third study, it was clarified that the errors which were made in the recognition of English, approximated the familiar pattern of the language.
(1) Error responses had a positive correlation with the relative frequencies of letters which are used in English.
(2) Whether the responses were more English-like or not was judged by women college students. The most frequent case was that the responses were judged more English-like than the original stimuli. Then it may be said that the recognition of letter sequences had a tendency to elicit responses approximating the familiar pattern of a language.