「ひらがな」認知において「マス」はどのように働くのか : 閉じた枠の効果なのか相対的位置情報なのか

抄録

Sato (2011) demonstrated that the frame had a positive effect on hiragana recognition using a letter completion test (LCT). Following this conclusion, to determine whether its effect is mainly influenced by the character's relative position or by closure, 4 different LCTs were conducted: 1) regular frames (RF) and 2) without frames (WOF), both used in Sato (2011); 3) frames without corners (WOC), which reduces the enclosure effect; and 4) center points without frames (CP), which reduces the relative position information. WOC and CP tests were first conducted on Native Japanese (NJ) and compared against Sato's results with RF and WOF LCTs. An additional study was conducted on Japanese Learners (JL), considered to have limited ability to recognize letter forms, using RF, CP, and WOF LCTs. Compared to WOF results, WOC showed similar improvement as RF. On the other hand, CP gave mixed results, with small improvement similar to RF seen for NJ, and as with WOF, no improvement seen for JL. These results suggest that, characters' relative positions influence the recognition of hiragana.