Two experiments were conducted with Japanese subjects to investigate whether in reading Japanese phonological recoding is an obligatory stage or the direct access to semantic representation is the general rule. The first experiment used a word reading-out task and the second, a sentence judgement task. In the first experiment
Kana (Japanese characters) were read out faster than
Kanji (Chinese characters), but in the second experiment with the silent reading condition
Kanji were judged faster than
Kana. These results suggest that
Kana is superior to
Kanji in access to the phonemic codes, but this does not imply that the meaning is comprehended more rapidly in
Kana. In contrast,
Kanji takes longer for reading out (decoding) than
Kana, but makes rapid access to semantic codes possible. This seems to indicate that in the silent reading of
Kanji the direct proccessing from visual (graphemic) codes to meaning (semantic codes) is possible, whereas in
Kana the relation of graphemic codes to meaning is mediated by the phonemic system.
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