How Do Japanese Language Learners Identify the Speaker of Conversation at the Beginning of Literary Fiction?

Abstract

  The present study investigated how Japanese language learners identify the speaker of conversation appearing in the first lines of Japanese literary fiction. The participants in our experiments were intermediate and advanced learners whose native language is Chinese. The procedure was (1) translating the lines into Chinese and (2) multifaceted questions on the content of the story. The results showed that the speaker is identified by the following factors: (1) the sentence-ending particles and conjunctive expressions in the quoted clauses, (2) the conjunctive expressions, the directives, and clause-final modality forms in the narrative parts, and (3)the speaker of other conversations. In addition, factors causing misreading included lack of knowledge of cultural convention and the genre, misuse of vocabulary/grammar knowledge, and another misunderstanding of the content of the narrative. Moreover, in some cases, misreading was avoided by noticing a problem with textual coherence and attempting to reconstruct the context.