Psycholinguistic nature of the Japanese orthography

要旨

Beginning with the adoption of the Chinese language and proceeding to modern script reforms, the Japanese orthography is reviewed briefly from an historical perspective. After the historical discussion, the two types of script, kana and kanji, are discussed from a phonetic perspective to clarify the relationship between the Japanese sound system and the Japanese orthography. In addition to the phonetic argument, from the visual perspective, the Japanese scripts of kana and kanji are discussed in terms of activation units of kanji, an adequate kanji content ratio in Japanese sentences, and the sense-determinative and sense-discriminative functions of kana and kanji.

主題