Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The effects of polysemy for Japanese katakana words

  • Chapter
Cognitive Processing of the Chinese and the Japanese Languages

Part of the book series: Neuropsychology and Cognition ((NPCO,volume 14))

Abstract

In these experiments, the effects of polysemy were examined as a function of word frequency for Japanese katakana words, words which have consistent character-to-sound correspondences. In the lexical decision task, an additive relationship was observed between polysemy and frequency (i.e., polysemy effects were identical for high and low frequency katakana words). In the naming task, although no word frequency effect was observed, there was a significant polysemy effect which, as in the lexical decision task, was identical for high and low frequency words. The implications of these results for conclusions about the loci of polysemy and frequency effects in lexical decision and naming tasks are discussed.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 129.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 169.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  • Balota, D.A. and Chumbley, J.I. (1984). Are lexical decisions a good measure of lexical access? The role of word frequency in the neglected decision stage, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 10: 340–357.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Balota, D.A. and Chumbley, J.I. (1985). The locus of word-frequency effects in the pronunciation task: Lexical access and/or production? Journal of Memory and Language 24: 89–106.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Balota, D.A., Ferraro, R.F. and Connor, L.T. (1991). On the early influence of meaning in word recognition: A review of the literature. In: P. J. Schwanenflugel (ed.), The psychology of word meanings (pp. 187–221 ). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Balota, D.A. and Paul, S.T. (1996). Summation of activation: Evidence from multiple primes that converage and diverge within semantic memory, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 22: 827–845.

    Google Scholar 

  • Besner, D. (1983). Basic decoding components in reading: Two dissociable feature extraction processes, Canadian Journal of Psychology 37: 429–438.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Besner, D. (in press). Basic processes in reading: Multiple routes in localist and connectionist models. In: R.M. Klein and P.A. McMullen (eds.), Converging methods for understanding reading and dyslexia Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (in press).

    Google Scholar 

  • Besner, D. and Hildebrandt, N. (1987). Orthographic and phonological codes in the oral reading of Japanese kana, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 13: 335–343.

    Google Scholar 

  • Besner, D. and McCann, R.S. (1987). Word frequency and pattern distortion in visual word identification and production: An examination of four classes of models. In: M. Coltheart (ed.), Attention and performance, Vol. 12 (pp. 201–219 ). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Besner, D., Twilley, L., McCann, R.S. and Seergobin, K. (1990). On the association between connectionism and data: Are a few words necessary? Psychological Review, 97: 432–446.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Borowsky, R. and Masson, M.E.J. (1996). Semantic ambiguity effects in word identification, Journal of Experiment Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 22: 63–85.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brown, P., Lupker, S.J. and Colombo, L. (1994). Interacting sources of information in word naming: A study of individual differences, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 20: 537–554.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carr, T.H., Posner, M.I., Pollatsek, A. and Snyder, C.R.R. (1979). Orthography and familiarity effects in word processing, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 108: 389–414.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chumbley, J.I. and Balota, D.A. (1984). A word’s meaning affects the decision in lexical decision, Memory and Cognition 12: 590–606.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Clark, H.H. (1973). The language-as-fixed-effect fallacy: A critique of language statistics in psychological research, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 12: 335–359.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Coltheart, M. (1978). Lexical access in simple reading tasks. In G. Underwood (ed.), Strategies of information processing (pp. 151–216 ). London: Academic Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Coltheart, M., Curtis, B., Atkins, P. and Haller, M. (1993). Models of reading aloud: Dual-route and parallel-distributed-processing approaches, Psychological Review 100: 589–608.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Coltheart, M., Davelaar, E., Jonasson, J.T. and Besner, D. (1977). Access to the internal lexicon. In: S. Dornic (ed.), Attention and performance, Vol. 6 (pp. 535–555 ). New York: Academic Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fera, P., Joordens, S., Balota, D.A., Ferraro, F.R. and Besner, D. (1992). Ambiguity in meaning and phonology: Effects on naming. Paper presented at the 33rd annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, St. Louis, MO, November 1992.

    Google Scholar 

  • Forster, K.I. and Bednall, E.S. (1976). Terminating and exhaustive search in lexical access, Memory and Cognition 4: 53–61.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Forster, K.I. and Chambers, S.M. (1973). Lexical access and naming time, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 12: 627–635.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Frost, R., Katz, L. and Bentin, S. (1987). Strategies for visual word recognition and orthographical depth: A multilingual comparison, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 13: 104–115.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Gernsbacher, M.A. (1984). Resolving 20 years of inconsistent interactions between lexical familiarity and orthography, concreteness, and polysemy, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 113: 256–281.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Grainger, J. and Jacobs, A.M. (1996). Orthographic processing in visual word recognition: A multiple read-out model, Psychological Review 103: 518–565.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Hino, Y. and Lupker, S.J. (1996). The effects of polysemy in lexical decision and naming: An alternative to lexical access accounts, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 22: 1321–1335.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hino, Y. and Lupker, S.J. (in press). The effects of word frequency for Japanese kana and kanjiwords in naming and lexical decision: Can the dual-route model save the lexical-selection account? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

    Google Scholar 

  • James, C.T. (1975). The role of semantic information in lexical decisions, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 1: 130–136.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jastrzembski, J.E. (1981). Multiple meanings, number of related meanings, frequency of occurrence, and the lexicon, Cognitive Psychology 13: 278–305.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jastrzembski, J.E. and Stanners, R.F. (1975). Multiple word meanings and lexical search speed, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 14: 534–537.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kellas, G., Ferraro, F.R. and Simpson, G.B. (1988). Lexical ambiguity and the timecourse of attentional allocation in word recognition, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 14: 601–609.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Kucera, H. and Francis, W.N. (1967). Computational analysis of present-day American English. Providence, RI: Brown University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • McClelland, J.L. and Rumelhart, D.E. (1981). An interactive activation model of context effects in letter perception: Part 1. An account of basic findings, Psychological Review 88: 375–407.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Millis, M.L. and Buttons, S.B. (1989). The effect of polysemy on lexical decision time: Now you see it, now you don’t, Memory and Cognition 17: 141–147.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Monsell, S. (1991). The nature and locus of word frequency effects in reading. In: D. Besner and G.W. Humphreys (eds.), Basic processes in reading: Visual word recognition (pp. 148197 ). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Monsell, S., Doyle, M.C. and Haggard, P.N. (1989). Effects of frequency on visual word recognition tasks: Where are they? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 118: 43–71.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Morton, J. (1969). Interaction of information in word recognition, Psychological Review 76: 165–178.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Morton, J. and Sasanuma, S. (1984). Lexical access in Japanese. In: L. Henderson (ed.), Orthographies and reading: Perspectives from cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and linguistics (pp. 25–42 ). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

    Google Scholar 

  • National Language Research Institute (1970). Studies on the vocabulary of modern newspapers, Vol. 1: General descriptions and vocabulary frequency tables. Tokyo: Shuei Shuppan (in Japanese).

    Google Scholar 

  • National Language Research Institute (1971). Studies on the vocabulary of modern newspapers, Vol. 2: Vocabulary tables classified from the lexicological and grammatical point of view. Tokyo: Shuei Shuppan (in Japanese).

    Google Scholar 

  • National Language Research Institute (1993). Bunrui Goi Hyou [Floppy Disk Version]. Tokyo: Shuei Shuppan (in Japanese).

    Google Scholar 

  • Paap, K.R., McDonald, J.E., Schvaneveldt, R.W. and Noel, R.W. (1987). Frequency and pronounceability in visually presented naming and lexical decision tasks. In: M. Coltheart (ed.), Attention and performance Vol. 12 (pp. 221–243 ). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Paap, K.R. and Noel, R.W. (1991). Dual-route models of print to sound: Still a good horse race, Psychological Research 53: 13–24.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Plant, D.C. and McClelland, J.L. (1993). Generalization with componential attractors: Word and nonword reading in an attractor network. Proceedings of the 15th annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 824–829 ). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Plaut, D.C., McClelland, J.L., Seidenberg, M.S. and Patterson, K. (1996). Understanding normal and impaired word reading: Computational principles in quasi-regular domains, Psychological Review 103: 56–115.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Posner, M.I. and Carr, T.H. (1992). Lexical access and the brain: Anatomical constraints on cognitive models of word recognition, American Journal of Psychology 105: 1–26.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Rubenstein, H., Garfield, L. and Millikan, J.A. (1970). Homographic entries in the internal lexicon, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 9: 487–494.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rubenstein, H., Lewis, S.S. and Rubenstein, M.A. (1971). Homographic entries in the internal lexicon: Effects of systematicity and relative frequency of meanings, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 10: 57–62.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rumelhart, D.E. and McClelland, J.L. (1982). An interactive activation model of context effects in letter perception: Part 2. The contextual enhancement effect and some tests and extensions of the model, Psychological Review 89: 60–94.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Seidenberg, M.S. (1992). Beyond orthographic depth in reading: Equitable division of labor. In: R. Frost and L. Katz (eds.), Orthography, phonology, morphology, and meaning (pp. 85–118 ). Amsterdam: North-Holland.

    Google Scholar 

  • Seidenberg, M.S. and McClelland, J.L. (1989). A distributed, developmental model of word recognition and naming, Psychological Review 96: 521–568.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sternberg, S. (1969). The discovery of processing stages: Extensions of Donders’ method, Acta Psychologica 30: 276–315.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Strain, E., Patterson, K. and Seidenberg, M.S. (1995). Semantic effects in single-word naming, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 21: 1140–1154.

    Google Scholar 

  • Theios, J. and Muise, J.G. (1977). The word identification process in reading. In: N.J. Castellan, D.B. Pisoni and G.R. Potts (eds.), Cognitive theory, Vol. 2 (pp. 289–321 ). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Van Orden, G. C., Pennington, B.F. and Stone, G.O. (1990). Word identification in reading and the promise of subsymbolic psycholinguistics, Psychological Review 97: 488–522.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Wydell, T.N., Butterworth, B. and Patterson, K. (1995). The inconsistency of consistency effects in reading: The case of Japanese kanji, Journal of Experiment Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 21: 1155–1168.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, The University of Western Ontario, Canada

    Stephen J. Lupker

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Canada

    Chris R. Sears

  3. Graduate School of Human Informatics, Nagoya University, Japan

    Taeko Ogawa

  4. Department of Psychology, Chukyo University, 101-2 Yagotohonmachi, Showaku, Nagoya, Aichi 466, Japan

    Yasushi Hino

Authors
  1. Yasushi Hino
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Stephen J. Lupker
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Chris R. Sears
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Taeko Ogawa
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yasushi Hino .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Saskatchewan, Canada

    Che Kan Leong  & Katsuo Tamaoka  & 

  2. Hiroshima University, Japan

    Che Kan Leong  & Katsuo Tamaoka  & 

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Hino, Y., Lupker, S.J., Sears, C.R., Ogawa, T. (1998). The effects of polysemy for Japanese katakana words. In: Leong, C.K., Tamaoka, K. (eds) Cognitive Processing of the Chinese and the Japanese Languages. Neuropsychology and Cognition, vol 14. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9161-4_12

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9161-4_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-90-481-5140-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-015-9161-4

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation