"Written Japanese is composed
of two distinct orthographies: Kanji (chinese
characters), the logographic script used to represent lexical morphemes,
and Kana, the syllabic script. Kana
is further subdivided in two: Katakana
is the character set used to represent foreign loanwords (e.g. telephone,
computer), and the Hiragana character
set is used to represent grammatical morphemes." There is one-to-one correspondence
between the hiragana and katakana letters. they consist of seventy-one
letters each that represent five vowels, sixty-five consonant-vowel combinations,
and the nasal coda (Akita & Hatano, 1999).
Kana is also a "regular" script in the sense that each character has an
invariant pronunciaion: each character corresponds to a syllable (except
for two letters). Kanji can be translated in Kana, and if so, the reader
should implement the strategies for reading Kana. Reading in written Kana
is presumed to be based on phonological recoding, so the reading difficulties
should be the same as the ones showed in English. Thus, the same difficulties
observed in reading non-words are to be shown in reading words as well.
Therefore, if an individual is unable to deal with non-words written in
Kana, then his or her performance on words written in Kana is extremely
poor, although he or she might be able to read in Kanji" (Besner
& Hildebrandt, 1987).
Besner and Hildebrandt (1987)
in a study conducted with 10 females living in Montreal for less than 2
years, concluded that reading in Japanese Katakana involves same psychological
operations as the ones showed in English such as: lexical access to familiar
words and phonological assembly for decoding non-words and unfamiliar words.
More research is needed
to see if these results are consistent among larger samples (this research
was carried out with only 10 students) and with a more detailed study on
the different forms of Japanese orthography.
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