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The manuscript was microfilmed as received. 52 UMI THE EFFECTS OF PRIMING ON RECOGNITION LATENCIES TO FAMILIAR AND UNFAMILIAR ORTHOGRAPHIC FORMS OF JAPANESE WORDS DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University by Kim Ainsworth-Damell, M.A., BA. ***** The Ohio State University 1998 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Julie E. Boland, Adviser Professor Keith Johnson Adviser Professor J. Marshall Unger Linguistics Graduate Program UMI Number: 9833940 Copyright 1998 by Ainsworth-Damell, Kim Ail rights reserved. UMI Microform 9833940 Copyright 1998, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 ABSTRACT One of the longest standing debates in the visual word recognition literature concerns whether or not the transparency of the symbol-sound relationship for an orthographic system influences how words in that system are processed. The current study investigates this issue with Japanese, a language with multiple orthographies, including the phonologically transparent hiragana and the phono logically opaque kanji. Utilizing a visual lexical decision task, I presented native speakers of Japanese with the kanji and hiragana forms of nouns that were either familiar in both orthographies (orthographically neutral) or only familiar in kanji (kanji dominant). In Experiment 1, targets were preceded by one of three visual primes: a semantically related real word, a semantically unrelated real word, or a string of three asterisks. In all three priming conditions, orthographically familiar targets were recognized more quickly and accurately than unfamiliar ones. Importantly, the expected priming effect was found, but it did not interact with the orthographic depth of the target word. In Experiment 2, targets were preceded by one of three auditory primes: the spoken form of the target, a phonologically legal nonword, or a 100 ms tone. The pattern of the results was the same as in Experiment I, with the additional finding of a larger priming effect for unfamiliar orthographic forms compared to their familiar counterparts. In Experiment 3, targets were preceded one o f five visual primes: the target word in the same orthography, the target word in the opposite orthography, a nonword in the same orthography, a nonword in the opposite orthography, or a string of asterisks. The patterns of response times and error rates were similar to the previous two experiments, and the larger priming effect for unfamiliar orthographic forms compared to familiar orthographic forms was again observed. Collectively, these findings are consistent with previous work demonstrating that orthographic familiarity has a greater influence over the processing of written words in Japanese than orthographic depth (e.g., Besner & Hildebrandt, 1987; Hirose, 1984, 1985, 1992; Sasanuma, Sakuma, & Tatsumi, 1988). They extend the literature by demonstrating that orthographic familiarity effects are reliable within-word and that phonological and orthographic identity priming affect the recognition speed for Japanese words according to orthographic familiarity, not orthographic depth. These results support a weighted network model in which the strength of the associations between semantic, phonological, and orthographic information reflects the reader’s experience. lU For Jim, Jazz, and Lacy IV ACKNOWLEDGMENTS No project like this can be completed alone, and it is with the deepest gratitude that I acknowledge the help and support of the following people: Jim Ainsworth-Damell, for his love, dedication, and unwavering faith in my ability to succeed; Julie E. Boland, for her intellectual and emotional support throughout my graduate career, as well as her patience and enthusiasm during my development as a psycholinguist; Tadahisa Kondo, for providing me with access to the NTT Lexical Familiarity Database and sharing with me his expertise in computer programming, the Japanese language, and experimental design; Keith Johnson, for his sense of humor, his willingness to be my sounding board at a moment’s notice, and his advice on how to interpret and present my data; Mineharu Nakayama and J. Marshall Unger for their patience and valuable advice on how to interpret my results and improve earlier drafts of this manuscript; Rob Fox and Mary Beckman, for their assistance with the statistical analysis; and Arnold M. Zwicky for being my mentor and my finend, and encouraging me to investigate the theoretical questions that I foimd compelling, regardless of “market trends.” I also thank Tatsuya Hirahara, Taeko Wydell, and Kiyoko Yoneyama for providing me with their professional expertise in language processing research, as well as their native speaker judgments, and Taeko Wydell and Ram Frost for their comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. Lastly, I thank my parents, who raised me with a love and respect for learning, and who taught me that the approval of others is never so important as the approval of oneself. This research was made possible by an International Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Security Education Program and a Visiting Research Fellowship from NTT Basic Research Laboratories. VI VITA August 23, 1968 ...................................................Bom - Boulder, Colorado 1992 .......................................................................B.A. Japanese, University of Hawai’i 1996 .......................................................................M.A. Linguistics, The Ohio State University 1992 - present ....................................................... Graduate Teaching and Research Associate, The Ohio State University PUBLICATIONS Ainsworth-Damell, K., Shulman, H.G., and Boland, J.E. (1998). Dissociating brain responses to syntactic and semantic anomalies: Evidence from event-related potentials. The Joumal of Memory and Language. Volume 38(1), 112-130. Ainsworth-Damell, K. (1997). A Review of Studies in Written Language and Literacy, Volume 3: Writing and Literacy in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, by Insup Taylor and M. Martin Taylor, 1995. Joumal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese. Darnell, K., Shulman, H.G., and Boland, J.E. (1996). Exploring the independence of brain response to syntactic and semantic anomalies. The Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics: Papers from the Linguistics Laboratory, Volume 47. vu Damell, K., Boland, J., and Nakayama, M. (1994). The influence of orthography and sentence constraint on the processing of nouns in Japanese. The Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics: Papers from the Linguistics Laboratory, Volume 44. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: Linguistics vm TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication ................................................................................................................ v Acknowledgments ................................................................................................... vi Vita ........................................................................................................................... viii List of Tables ........................................................................................................... xii List of Figures .......................................................................................................... xiii Chapters: 1. Background and overview .......................................................................... I I. I Orthographic depth and visual word recognition ..................... 2 1.11 Empirical evidence ..................................................................... 3 1.12 Theoretical implications ............................................................ 6 1.2 The current study ....................................................................... 7