Dissociation of reading and writing romanized Japanese by Japanese college students

Yamada Jun

Che Kan Leong

Reading and Writing

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.

romaji

dissociation between reading and writing

reading experience

Psychology [ 140 ]

eng

Springer

Copyright (c) 2005 Springer "The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com"

[ISSN] 0922-4777

[DOI] 10.1007/s11145-005-3356-y

[DOI] http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11145-005-3356-y isVersionOf