The Japanese mental lexicon: Psycholinguistic studies of kana and kanji processing. By Joseph F. Kess and Tadao Miyamoto. Philadelphia & Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999. Pp 265.

要旨

Reviewed by: The Japanese mental lexicon: Psycholinguistic studies of kana and kanji processingby Joseph F. Kess, Tadao Miyamoto R. A. Brown The Japanese mental lexicon: Psycholinguistic studies of kana and kanji processing. By Joseph F. Kess and Tadao Miyamoto. Philadelphia & Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999. Pp 265. Japanese psycholinguistics has traditionally been primarily concerned with identifying processing differences between the orthographic subsystems used to write Japanese: the (supposedly) ideographic kanji characters, and the two phonemic kana syllabaries (hiragana and katakana). The Japanese mental lexiconis a review and assessment of this research tradition. For readers who are unfamiliar with the remarkably complicated Japanese writing system, Kess and Miyamoto provide a concise account of the development and current use of the three (or four, including romaji—a truncated version of the English alphabet), and a concluding antepenultimate paragraph on the social role of kanji literacy. The chapter on kanji processing summarizes a wide variety of studies in Japanese and Chinese. Results of these studies do not support the widely held belief that kanji convey meaning directly. The chapter includes an interesting summary of kinetic memory studies. Kana and especially romaji processing have been relatively neglected, the obvious consequence of the general belief that kanji are inherently meaningful and represent meanings directly. Processing differences between kana types have been difficult to pin down because, despite being phonemically equivalent, they are not in general functionally interchangeable, so that task and context dependent frequency and familiarity effects confound the results. ‘Acquisition of orthography skills’ is the most interesting chapter in the book. Kanji are not inherently meaningful, but when they are taught in meaning-rich contexts (or with their associated meanings) they are significantly easier to learn, complexity notwithstanding. They are not much different from kana graphs in this respect. Kana are not taught the way that kanji are, but this is not because they cannot be. Oddly, the authors cite Sakamoto and Makita’s claim of 99% literacy in Japan (139), while noting that there is no official Ministry of Education definition of literacy. This figure has been cited many times in many places but has always been based on a series of tenuous assumptions, does not represent any social reality, and would be meaningless even if it did. They also discuss Makita’s claim that dyslexia does not exist in Japan (146). This claim also was never worth serious consideration since it was based on a highly defective initial survey. They conclude that there may be reading dysfunctions in Japan and that while the more regular nature of kana compared to the English alphabet would make reading easier to learn in Japan, the need to learn the extraordinarily complex kanji system has no parallel in alphabet using countries. Assuming that dyslexia is less common in Japan, one could still question whether kanji have anything to do with it. Once they learn the kana syllabaries, Japanese children have no difficulties sounding out words because the names of the individual kana graphs are precisely the same as their pronunciations. But a child who has learned the names of the letters [End Page 352]of the alphabet (as it is used in American English, for example), will not necessarily be able to correctly sound out many exceedingly common words, like ‘dog’ and ‘cat’. Japanese children have their own set of reading problems however, posed by the fact that Japanese can be written both vertically and horizontally. The authors cite research indicating that reading disabilities are indeed about as common in Japan as in some western countries (149). The eye movement studies chapter indicates that while reading Japanese is more orthography driven than reading English, the fundamental process is the same. In both written langu

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