Word length effects for kana and kanji words in lexical decision tasks

Abstract

Using the lexical decision task, we compare task performance for three- versus four-character katakana words and two- versus three-character kanji words. While no length effect was observed for katakana words, a significant effect was observed for kanji words, such that lexical decision latencies were longer for three-character kanji words than for two-character kanji words. This effect was observed even when orthographic neighborhood sizes were matched across the two kanji-word groups. Because the kanji words are compound words, but the katakana words are mono-morphemic words, the observation of a length effect only for kanji words may indicate that the effect is due to the difference in the number of morphemes. Assuming morphological decomposition for kanji compound words, the constituent morphemes would have to be recombined to access to whole-word representations. Thus, the length effect could arise within the recombination process because three-character kanji compounds have more complicated morphological structures than two-character kanji compounds. As such, the present results suggest that the nature of reading process is highly dependent on the morphological structure that a word possesses.View full abstract