The purpose of this study was to examine the role and nature of phonology in silent reading of Japanese sentences. An experiment was conducted using a Japanese sentence acceptability judgment task. One important finding was that participants more rapidly rejected homophonic sentences in which one two-kanji compound word was replaced by its…

Studies using the lexical decision task with English stimuli have demonstrated that homophones are responded to more slowly than nonhomophonic controls. In contrast, several studies using Chinese stimuli have shown that homophones are responded to more rapidly than nonhomophonic controls. In an attempt to better understand the impact of homophony,…

Provides background information on Japanese writing system and how most Japanese learn to read Japanese at school, discusses history and practice of typical English-language education in Japan, presents review of recent research on word recognition and the effects of first-language reading on English-as-a-Second/Foreign Language (ESL/EFL), and…