The present study examined whether the processing of orthographic information from two-kanji compound words is affected by contextual information. Twenty-four undergraduate and graduate Japanese students participated in each experiment. Experiment 1 used two-kanji compound words in a lexical decision task to study orthographic processing at the lexical level. Experiment 2 required participants to detect misspellings (i.e., incorrect kanji combinations) of two-kanji compound stimuli embedded in sentencees. Experiment 3 used a semantic decision task. In this task, in addition to the sentences used in Experiment 2, contextually incorrect but existing kanji compound words were used as fillers in sentences. In all three tasks, orthographically similar nonwords (矛約 in place of the real word 予約), caused longer reaction times and more errors than orthographically dissimilar nonwords (吐約). However, post-hoc analysis of error rates among the three experiments showed that orthographic processing of orthographically similar nonwords presented individually seems to differ from when the same nonwords are embedded in sentences. This result suggests that contextual information does have an influence on orthographic processing.

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Japanese high school teachers rated 100 students on 30 social behaviors using a Japanese translation of the Social Skills Rating System (SSRS, Gresham & Elliott, 1990). Items on the Japanese scale (J-SSRS) formed two culturally meaningful subscales: Academic and Interpersonal. Japanese teachers’ ratings demonstrated that they considered nearly all 30 skills to be important in their classrooms and that they viewed Academic and Interpersonal skills as equally important. Ratings of students on the Academic subscale were strongly correlated with GPA. Female students were rated higher on both Academic and Interpersonal subscales than were males. Both subscales demonstrated high internal consistency reliability. Based on this initial study, it appears that the scale could be useful for assessing two types of social skills in Japanese high school students: skills that are highly related to academic achievement and skills that are important in school, but are not directly related to academic achievement.

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The present study was designed to investigate the role of imagery on paired-associate learning (PAL) of Japanese Kanji (Chinese ideograph) and English word meaning. Twenty-three foreign students from non-Kanji using countries participated in the study. To explore the effects of associative imagery and word imagery, three conditions were compared, namely, associative picture (AP) presentation, standard picture (SP) presentation and imagery instruction (II). Recall performances were analyzed from the viewpoint of Shape-imagery (the ease of associating a Kanji shape with the imagery of its referent: SI). Memory performances for high-SI Kanji were the same under all conditions. However, in low-SI Kanji, AP proved to yield better memory performances than the other two conditions. These results showed that associative imagery, not imagery of the stimulus itself, plays an important role in PAL. This finding seems to support Bower’s interpretation (1970) about the role of imagery in the PAL of word pairs.

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The present study compared the effectiveness of multisensory and traditional approach in teaching dyslexic children learning to read and write a non-alphabetic script, Chinese. Thirty-six Chinese dyslexic children of Grade 3 to Grade 5 were assigned to the Multisensory Training Group (n=17) and Traditional Training Group (n=19) respectively. The two groups received different training programs in Chinese reading and writing. The Multisensory Training Group, as compared to the Traditional Training Group, showed greater improvement after training in reading, writing and understanding the trained and nontrained materials. The results suggest that multisensory training benefits dyslexic children in learning to read and write Chinese.

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The present paper examines the nature of the similarities and differences in the desired physical and psychological characteristics of lover and cross-sex friend among college students. Fourteen physical and twenty five psychological traits were presented to 160 Bengali Hindu college students who rated them in terms of their desirability in either a date or a cross sex friend. Results indicated that women put greater emphasis on psychological characteristics, while men emphasized physical traits to a greater extent. However considerable overlap across sex and target was also observed. Differences and similarities with Western studies have been highlighted. The findings seem to partially support both the evolutionary hypothesis and the social learning model.

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