Brigham Young University BYU ScholarsArchive Theses and Dissertations 2012-06-07 The Effect of Furigana on Lexical Inferencing of Unknown Kanji Words Joy A. Palmer Brigham Young University - Provo Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd Part of the Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures Commons BYU ScholarsArchive Citation Palmer, Joy A., "The Effect of Furigana on Lexical Inferencing of Unknown Kanji Words" (2012). Theses and Dissertations. 3235. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/3235 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact
[email protected],
[email protected]. The Effect of Furigana on Lexical Inferencing of Unknown Kanji Words Joy Palmer A thesis submitted to the faculty of Brigham Young University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts J Paul Warnick, Chair Masakazu Watabe Dan P. Dewey Center for Language Studies Brigham Young University June 2012 Copyright © 2012 Joy Palmer All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT The Effect of Furigana on Lexical Inferencing of Unknown Kanji Words Joy Palmer Center for Language Studies, BYU Master of Arts The present study investigates the effect of furigana on lexical inferencing. After completing a pretest to determine their knowledge of the target words, participants read a passage and completed a think-aloud protocol and questionnaire. The experimental group read a passage with furigana over all kanji words while the control group read a passage without furigana. The protocols were evaluated to determine the rate and quality of lexical inferences of 16 target kanji words.