Semantic effects in word naming: evidence from English and Japanese Kanji.
Three experiments investigated whether reading aloud is affected by a semantic variable, imageability. The first two experiments used English, and the third experiment used Japanese Kanji as a way of testing the generality of the findings across orthographies. The results replicated the earlier findings that readers were slower and more error prone in reading low-frequency exception words when they were low in imageability than when they were high in imageability (Strain, Patterson, & Seidenberg, 1995). This result held for both English and Kanji even when age of acquisition was taken into account as a possible confounding variable, and the imageability effect was stronger in Kanji compared to English.
Shibahara
Naoki
N
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, UK. n.shibahara@ucl.ac.uk
Zorzi
Marco
M
Hill
Martin P
MP
Wydell
Taeko
T
Butterworth
Brian
B
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010700:Phonetics; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D014825:Vocabulary