Dissociation of reading and writing romanized Japanese by Japanese college students

The Japanese writing system has four scripts, but the use of the fourth script, called romaji, is quite limited in an interesting way. To investigate how Japanese college students read and write romaji, we examined proficiency in this script and hiragana (a traditional syllabary) in four experiments: proficiency in writing isolated words in Experiments 1 and 2, oral reading speeds at the text level in Experiment 3, and naming latencies for syllables in Experiment 4. The results taken together showed that while writing speed is almost comparable between romaji hiragana, reading speed much slower in romaji than in hiragana. It is suggested that this dissociation can arise mainly from a differential pattern of reading and writing experiences in romaji among Japanese people. Some theoretical implications are given for the future of romaji in Japan

Cognitive and linguistic factors affecting alphasyllabary language users comprehending Chinese text

Two groups of 13 to14-year-old alphasyllabary language users (mainly Hindi and Urdu), in integrated or designated school settings (respectively 40 and 48 students), were compared with 59 Chinese students in comprehending 4 elementary Chinese texts, each with three inferential questions requiring short open-ended written answers. Three constructs each with two indicators were hypothesized to predict text comprehension differentially in the three groups: verbal working memory, orthographic processing and sentence processing. The 147 students also completed a short questionnaire on their reading and writing of Chinese, a 43-item Students’ Approaches to Learning and a non-verbal general intelligence test. Multivariate analyses of variance and hierarchical multiple regression analyses point to the significant contribution of verbal span working memory, orthographic choice in context and sentence processing in Chinese to Chinese text comprehension. Educational implications include strengthening teaching the structure and function of Chinese characters and words to enhance text comprehension

Pronunciation of low-frequency irregular words in estimating premorbid intelligence

Recently, McGurn et al. (2004) confirmed that the pronunciation of the low frequency and irregular words in the National Adult Reading Test (NART) is preserved in adult patients with dementia and NART provides a good estimate of premorbid intelligence of these patients. We attempted to answer these intriguing questions by examining the phonological structure of NART words, particularly the optimality of the demisyllables constituting these words. Following Clement (1990), we found the initial and final demisyllables of NART words are near optimal in sonority dispersion as compared with some regularly spelled counterparts. The near optimality of NART words may facilitate their retrieval and become part of "crystallized intelligence". We further invoked the concept of word reading as paired-associate learning to explain the unique visual-verbal contribution to irregular word reading. We speculated that the pronunciation of NART-like low frequency Japanese kanji words or Chinese characters with optimal speech forms may also be preserved in Japanese or Chinese dementia patients and may correlate with premorbid intelligence.Edited by Kazuhito Yoshizaki and Hisao Ohnish

Psychology of reading

vii+414hlm.;25c

An experimental study of the attitudes and abilities of trainee teachers and their significance for teaching

published_or_final_versionEducationMasterMaster of Arts in Educatio