ベトナム人日本語学習者による漢字2字語の語彙性判断における日越両言語間の音韻類似性および使用頻度の効果

要旨

Vietnam and Japan are both neighboring countries of China and have been strongly influenced by the Chinese at certain times. Modern Vietnamese is written in the Roman alphabet even though many Vietnamese words were borrowed from Chinese. In contrast, many Chinese characters (kanji) are used in modern Japanese with on-and kun-readings. We expect to find phonological similarity between two-kanji compound words in both Vietnamese and Japanese. Another strong factor is word frequency. In not only first language but also in second language, word frequency has always been a strong factor in word processing. Thus, we included word frequencies of both Vietnamese and Japanese. We examined 38 Vietnamese students of Japanese. The lexical decision task for Japanese two-kanji compounds was administered to the participants. We analyzed reaction times using a linear mixed-effects model. The result showed that both the main effects of phonological similarity and word frequency were significant: the higher the similarity and word frequency, the faster response times became. Both effects of phonological similarity and word frequency suggest that Vietnamese speakers unconsciously activate phonologically similar lexical items in both languages, confirming the language non-selective activations. In addition, the study found an interaction between phonological similarity and lexical knowledge. Interestingly, participants with higher level lexical knowledge had a slower processing speed for the high phonologically similar items whereas those with average or lower level lexical knowledge displayed faster response times. The phonologically similar items were activated in both languages, resulting in slower processing speed.

主題