Chapter 18 Processing of the Japanese Language by Native Chinese Speakers Tamaoka, K
Chapter 18 Processing of the Japanese language by native Chinese speakers Tamaoka, K. (2015). Chapter 18: Processing of the Japanese language by native Chinese speakers. Katsuo Tamaoka In Mineharu Nakayama (Ed.), Handbooks of Japanese Psycholinguistics (pp.283-332), Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter Mouton. 1. Introduction A great number of native Chinese speakers have been learning Japanese as a foreign language. According to the Japan Foundation (Kokusai Kōryū Kikin) (2011), the numbers of Japanese learners in 2009 were: 2,362 at elementary schools, 59,526 at secondary schools, and 529,508 at higher education institutions in mainland China, and 2,440 at elementary schools, 77,139 at secondary schools, and 119,898 at higher education institutions in Taiwan. Out of 128,161 foreign nationals who studied Japanese in Japan in 2011, the largest population enrolled in Japan’s 1,832 higher education institutions were Chinese speakers (63,249 from mainland China and 4,134 from Taiwan) according to the Agency for Cultural Affairs in Japan (Bunka-chō) (2011). Approximately half (52.58%) of the total learners studying Japanese in Japan were estimated to be native Chinese speakers. As the number of learners increases, various issues have been identified in their processing of Japanese. However, many studies regarding these issues have been published in journals in Japan, the majority of which are in Japanese. Given the nature of this handbook, I will introduce a variety of Japanese publications to English-speaking audiences, including the latest studies on lexical pitch accent, lexical access, and sentence processing by Chinese speaking learners of Japanese. While doing so, I will clarify the ultimate goals and issues of current second language processing research.
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