Cognitive space of kanji semantics - A contrastive study of Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and Mongolians learning Japanese

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 25580112
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Japanese language education
• Research Institution: Nagoya University
• Principal Investigator: Tamaoka Katsuo 名古屋大学, 国際言語文化研究科, 教授 (70227263)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): KIYAMA Sachiko 三重大学, 教養教育機構, 特任講師 (10612509)
• Project Period (FY): 2013-04-01 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: 漢字データベース / Web検索エンジン / 日本語学習者 / 二字漢字語 / 非言語選択的活性化 / 漢字の意味空間 / 漢字特性 / 部首

Outline of Final Research Achievements

In this grant, we have done four things: first, we created a database of two-kanji compound words for native Chinese- and Korean-speaking students who are learning Japanese, available as a search engine(http://kanjigodb.herokuapp.com). Second, using a corpus from the Mainichi newspaper (2000-2010), we created a Web-accessible search engine for 2136 joyo-kanji and their compounds (www.kanjidatabase.com). A paper explaining these tools was accepted by Psychological Research (Tamaoka et al., in press). Third, we created a Web-accessible experimental software for kanji semantic space. Finally, we published an ERP study of Chinese-and-Japanese bilinguals, indicating non-language selective word activation of both languages, but a cut-off mechanism for sentential processing of a target language (Tamaoka et al., 2016).

Free Research Field

計量言語学