The effects of articulatory suppression on the homophone judgments of Kanji words by Chinese learners of Japanese

Abstract

In this study, we examined the phonological processing performed by Chinese learners of Japanese (CLJs) in Japanese kanji recognition. In particular, we examined whether CLJs perform non-articulatory control processes that native speakers of Japanese perform. In Experiment 1, 17 advanced-level CLJs performed a homophone judgment task of Japanese two-word kanji pairs. The results showed that under the articulatory suppression condition, there were more errors under the homophone-pair condition than the control-pair condition, suggesting that CLJs performed an articulatory control process in phonological processing. In Experiment 2, we divided 40 CJLs into fast and slow groups by Japanese phoneme conversion speed. An experiment similar to Experiment 1 was performed, and the stimuli were revised for Chinese Japanese learners. As a result, errors also increased under articulatory suppression. In addition, the response time showed that learners with faster phoneme conversion speeds were more susceptible to articulatory suppression, suggesting that unlike native speakers of Japanese, CJLs separate the articulation of Japanese kanji into finer units whereby it is easier to perform articulatory control processes, and CJLs with a faster phonological conversion speed may find it easier to do so.