Processing Katakana and Kanji Nouns in Japanese

Abstract

This study investigates how katakana and kanji nouns embedded in a Japanese sentence are processed among native speakers of Japanese by employing self-paced reading tasks. Darnell et al. (1994) found in their experiments that the orthographic type used for nouns did not affect reading times (RTs) when a noun appeared without its lexical associates in a sentence. This study extends their study to include another script, katakana, which was not tested in their study. Contrary to their findings, our experimental results revealed that RTs were faster when the target nouns were written in the more familiar script such as katakana dominant words in katakana. Moreover, it was observed that script types did not change the RTs significantly with or without lexical associates. However, there still remains the possibility that Japanese native speakers process nouns transcribed in kanji and katakana differently, and further investigation is necessary directly comparing katakana and hiragana before we conclude that nouns in a sentence are always read faster when they are written in familiar script forms.