The Japanese Mental Lexicon

This book surveys the psycholinguistic dimensions of lexical access to the mental lexicon in Japanese, and attempts to synthesize the diversity of Japanese psycholinguistic research into the nature of written word processing in Japanese. Ten chapters focus on the nature of such psycholinguistic inquiry and its history, the structural origins of the Japanese script types and their relative frequencies, lexical access studies in kanji, the hiragana and katakana syllabaries, romaji, and mixed text processing, laterality preferences in kana/kanji processing and their implications for scientific discussions of language and cognition, evidence from eye-movement studies, the acquisition of orthographic skills by Japanese children, and a review of the implications and conclusions that arise from the contributions of such research. The text is directed at filling the need for an overview of this research because of its importance to theoretical modelling in linguistics and psychology, as well as aphasiology, mathematical and statistical linguistics, educational practices and governmental intervention in respect to language policies, and studies of linguistic and cultural history.

How are words organized in the bilingual mind? How are they linked to concepts? How do bi- and multilinguals process words in their multiple languages? Contributions to this volume offer up-to-date answers to these questions and provide a detailed introduction to interdisciplinary approaches used to investigate the bilingual lexicon.

This book proposes the Bilingual Lemma Activation Model as a method for exploring the nature and activity of the bilingual mental lexicon in both speech production and language acquisition. This model claims that the bilingual’s two languages are not equally activated in code-switching; one playing a crucial role in grammatical frame building, and the other being activated at a lexical level due to psycholinguistic reasons. To test this model, the book analyzes bilingual speech data from naturally occurring intrasentential code-switching instances involving various language pairs. A second claim of this model is that code-switching naturally occurs because certain lemmas underlying some particular lexical items stored in the bilingual mental lexicon are language-specific, and such lemmas are in contact in bilingual speech. To further test this model, second language acquisition data are analyzed here to describe and explain sources of language transfer at the level of abstract lexical structure. Thus, from some psycholinguistic perspectives, this model views bilingual speech involving code-switching and interlanguage performance data as predictable outcomes of bilingual systems in contact. This book will appeal to graduate students and researchers in both theoretical and applied linguistics.

'Advances in Psychology Research' presents original research results on the leading edge of psychology. Each chapter has been carefully selected in an attempt to present substantial advances across a broad spectrum.

This book provides readers with a unique array of scholarly reflections on the writing systems of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean in relation to reading processes and data-driven interpretations of cross-language transfer. Distinctively broad in scope, topics addressed in this volume include word reading with respect to orthographic, phonological, morphological, and semantic processing as well as cross-linguistic influences on reading in English as a second language or a foreign language. Given that the three focal scripts have unique orthographic features not found in other languages – Chinese as logography, Japanese with multi-scripts, and Korean as non-Roman alphasyllabary – chapters expound script-universal and script-specific reading processes. As a means of scaling up the body of knowledge traditionally focused on Anglocentric reading research, the scientific accounts articulated in this volume importantly expand the field’s current theoretical frameworks of word processing to theory building with regard to these three languages.

言語能力の発達のため、比喩とりわけメタファー(隠喩)の理解と運用能力がきわめて重要なことは、認知科学の上からも認められている。本書は、わが国の外国語(英語)学習者の運用能力(MC)の向上に資するため、最近のメタファー研究の成果に依拠して、独自のMCテスト等を通じ、日本人のメタファー理解の特質とわが国に最適のメタファー・言語教育の在り方を追求した英文の労作であり、外国人教員を含む外国語教育関係者へのアピール、さらに海外学界への発信を通じて、わが国外国語教育に大きなインパクトをもたらす研究と言えよう。

This volume will appeal to anyone interested in knowing more about the fundamental building blocks of language: words. It brings together the fields of linguistics, neuroscience, psycholinguistics, speech-language pathology, and language education to present multifaceted perspectives on the topic of vocabulary. The theoretical and empirical contributions included consider some of the key questions facing the field, such as What is the mental lexicon? What constitutes a word? What are new and novel approaches to measuring and researching vocabulary? and What is the best way to teach vocabulary? This book will be useful to graduate students and scholars in the fields of theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, applied linguistics, adult and child language acquisition, and modern languages. In addition, it will appeal to language educators at various institutions, immigrant service specialists, school board officials, and study abroad consultants.

Second Language Writing Systems looks at how people learn and use a second language writing system, arguing that they are affected by characteristics of the first and second writing systems, to a certain extent independently of the languages involved. This book presents for the first time the effects of writing systems on language reading and writing and on language awareness, and provides a new platform for discussing bilingualism, biliteracy and writing systems. The approach is interdisciplinary, with contributions not only from applied linguists and psychologists but also corpus linguists, educators and phoneticians. A variety of topics are covered, from handwriting to spelling, word recognition to the mental lexicon, and language textbooks to metalinguistic awareness. Though most of the studies concern adult L2 learners and users, other populations covered include minority children, immersion students and bilingual children. While the emphasis is on English as the L2 writing system, many other writing systems are analysed as L1 or L2: Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, Gujarati, Indonesian, Irish, Italian and Japanese. Approaches that are represented include contrastive analysis, transfer, poststructuralism, connectionism and corpus analysis. The readership is SLA and bilingualism researchers, students and teachers around the world; language teachers will also find much food for thought.