AUDITORY RECOGNITION OF CHINESE-JAPANESE COGNATES AND HOMOGRAPHS BY CHINESE JFL LEARNERS

Abstract

This study examines the influence of Chinese semantics and phonology on the auditory lexical processing of Japanese Kanji words by Chinese Japanese as a foreign language (JFL) intermediate learners in lexical decision task and translation task. The results of two experiments show that during the auditory lexical processing of Japanese Kanji words, (1) Chinese semantics is activated rapidly and inhibits the lexical activation of Chinese-Japanese homographs, with a stronger inhibitive effect on homographs with a high phonological similarity; (2) Chinese phonology is activated rapidly and inhibits the semantic processing of both cognates and homographs, and the inhibitory effect of Chinese phonology on homographs is stronger than on cognates; (3) The semantic and phonological information therefore shows dual inhibitive effects on homographs with a high phonological similarity in Japanese word processing. These results suggest that there will be strong negative impacts on Chinese learners who mainly rely on Chinese orthography, phonology and semantics in the process of Japanese word learning.