Novel insights from two key issues into kanji and kana processing.

Research Project

Project/Area Number	20K00544
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
Allocation Type	Multi-year Fund
Section	一般
Review Section	Basic Section 02060:Linguistics-related
Research Institution	Hiroshima University
Principal Investigator	Verdonschot RG 広島大学, 医系科学研究科(歯), 助教 (30756094)
Project Period (FY)	2020-04-01 – 2021-03-31
Project Status	Discontinued (Fiscal Year 2020)
Budget Amount *help	¥2,860,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,200,000、Indirect Cost: ¥660,000) Fiscal Year 2022: ¥1,170,000 (Direct Cost: ¥900,000、Indirect Cost: ¥270,000) Fiscal Year 2021: ¥650,000 (Direct Cost: ¥500,000、Indirect Cost: ¥150,000) Fiscal Year 2020: ¥1,040,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000、Indirect Cost: ¥240,000)
Keywords	kanji / hiragana / language production / psycholinguistics / Japanese / language processing / neurolinguistics / Japanese kanji / reading
Outline of Research at the Start	This project examines how kanji and kana are processed. Particularly, whether kanji and kana both evoke lexical items to the same extent (e.g. do 犬 and いぬ equally evoke “dog” in the Japanese mind?). This project uses behavioral and brain experiments to discover the precise answer to this question.
Outline of Annual Research Achievements	One paper is published (2021) in the Memory & Cognition Journal. In this paper we manipulated the script type of Japanese distractor words in the phonological Stroop task (see Verdonschot & Kinoshita, 2018). We found that color-naming responses were faster when the initial phoneme was shared between the color name + romaji distractor than when the initial phoneme was different, thereby showing a phoneme-based phonological Stroop effect. Next, in collaboration with Prof. Miyaoka we have begun recording EEG using a picture naming task with different script as distractors (kanji vs hiragana). Unfortunately, these experiments had to be put on hold due to the COVID outbreak.