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Paper short abstract

Research on alphabetic scripts shows that visual information from graphs quickly activates sound information during reading, but other phonographic scripts remain underexplored. This study examines the time of such activation in Japanese kana and explores how this process varies across individuals.

Paper long abstract

When people read words, visual information of written graphs rapidly activates information about their sounds. Research on visual word recognition has shown that readers of phonogram-based writing systems such as English and French automatically engage both orthographic (visual-form) and phonological (sound-based) information. Yet the time course of these processes remains underexplored in writing systems that employ syllabic scripts. Japanese, an agglutinative language, adopted sinograms from Chinese; however, the need to represent affixes and other grammatical elements in writing contributed to the development of kana, a syllabic script with a highly transparent correspondence between graphs and sounds. This historical development gave rise to a distinctive mixed writing system that combines different script types (sinograms for lexical roots and kana for grammatical and phonological specification). The present study explores how contemporary readers process kana, and whether the timing of orthographic and phonological activation varies across individuals, utilizing a psycholinguistic experiment where fifty native Japanese-speaking students underwent a masked-priming lexical decision task in which briefly presented strings of graphs (primes) precede target words. The experiment manipulates Prime Type (Orthographic–Phonological prime vs. Phonological prime) and Prime Duration (33 ms vs. 50 ms) to examine the relative timing of orthographic and phonological activation during kana word recognition. In addition, we collect measures of cognitive and individual characteristics to explore how individual differences relate to reading. Because kana has shallow orthographic depth, we expect a smaller temporal lag between orthographic and phonological activation than previous studies have reported for alphabetic scripts. By situating an experimental investigation of effective kana processing within the historical development of Japanese writing, this study aims to advance a culturally grounded and more inclusive account of visual word recognition, while providing a foundation for barrier-free approaches to literacy that accommodate individual variability in multimodal information processing.