Phonetic Activity in Reading: an Experiment With Kanji

Abstract

Reading seems to require phonetic short-term storage even if the writing system is logographic. A short-term memory probe paradigm was used to test the ability of Japanese subjects to recall kanji characters. When pairs of characters in a silently read list were homophonous, recall was significantly poorer than when the silently read list included no such pairs, presumably because of confusion in phonetic short-term storage. Since the kanji have no overt phonetic structure, it would seem that this kind of storage is involved in the reading of kanji not because of the particular structure of the writing system but because of the essentially linguistic nature of the task. Evidently the linguistic process cannot readily disperse with phonetic short-term storage. It is suggested, however, that the design of a writing system does not depend directly on linguistic process but rather on the partial and uneven awareness that users of the system have of certain aspects of this process.