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The multiple pronunciations of Japanese
kanji: A masked priming investigation
Rinus Gerardus Verdonschot
d

a b c

c

a

, Wido La Heij , Katsuo Tamaoka ,eSachiko Kiyama , Wen-Ping You & Niels Olaf Schillerb caGraduate School of Languages and Cultures, Nagoya University, Nagoya,JapanbLeiden Institute for Brain and Cognition & Leiden University Centre for
Linguistics, Leiden University, Leiden, The NetherlandscCognitive Psychology Unit and Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition,
Leiden University, Leiden, The NetherlandsdFunctional Brain Imaging Laboratory, Department of Gerontechnology,
National Center for Geriatrics and Gerontology, Ohbu, Japane

Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese
Academy of Sciences, Beijing, PR China
Accepted author version posted online: 05 Feb 2013.Version of record firstpublished: 19 Mar 2013.

To cite this article: Rinus Gerardus Verdonschot , Wido La Heij , Katsuo Tamaoka , Sachiko Kiyama , WenPing You & Niels Olaf Schiller (2013): The multiple pronunciations of Japanese kanji: A masked priming
investigation, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, DOI:10.1080/17470218.2013.773050
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2013.773050

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THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, 2013
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2013.773050

The multiple pronunciations of Japanese kanji: A masked
priming investigation
Rinus Gerardus Verdonschot1,2,3, Wido La Heij3, Katsuo Tamaoka1, Sachiko Kiyama4,
Wen-Ping You5, and Niels Olaf Schiller2,31

Graduate School of Languages and Cultures, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan
Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition & Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, Leiden University,
Leiden, The Netherlands
3
Cognitive Psychology Unit and Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University, Leiden,
The Netherlands
4
Functional Brain Imaging Laboratory, Department of Gerontechnology, National Center for Geriatrics andGerontology, Ohbu, Japan
5
Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, PR
China

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2

English words with an inconsistent grapheme-to-phoneme conversion or with more than one pronunciation (“homographic heterophones”; e.g., “lead”–/lεd/, /lid/) are read aloud more slowly than matched
controls, presumably due to competition processes. In Japanese kanji, the majority of the characters havemultiple readings for the same orthographic unit: the native Japanese reading (KUN) and the derived
Chinese reading (ON). This leads to the question of whether reading these characters also shows processing costs. Studies examining this issue have provided mixed evidence. The current study addressed
the question of whether processing of these kanji characters leads to the simultaneous activation of their
KUN and ON reading, This was measured in a direct way in a masked priming paradigm. In addition,
we assessed whether the relative frequencies of the KUN and ON pronunciations (“dominance ratio”,
measured in compound words) affect the amount of priming. The results of two experiments showed
that: (a) a single kanji, presented as a masked prime, facilitates the reading of the (katakana transcriptions of) their KUN and ON pronunciations; however, (b) this was most consistently found when thedominance ratio was around 50% (no strong dominance towards either pronunciation) and when thedominance was towards the ON reading (high-ON group). When the dominance was towards
the KUN reading (high-KUN group), no signiﬁcant priming for the ON reading was observed.
Implications for models of kanji processing are discussed.
Keywords: Reading aloud; Masked priming; Japanese kanji; Pronunciation; Phonology; Homographic
heterophony.

Correspondence should be addressed to Rinus Gerardus Verdonschot, School of Languages and Cultures, Nagoya University,
Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya-shi, Aichi-ken, 464-8601, Japan. E-mail: rinusverdonschot@gmail.com
R.V.’s research is presently supported by a Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) postdoctoral fellowship for foreign
researchers (P12315). The authors would like to thank Clemens Poppe for his support with the stimuli of Experiment 1 and John
Phillips, Nanae Murata, Chikako Ara, Satoru Muraoka, Yayoi Miyaoka, and Ritsuko Kikusawa for their help in recruiting andtesting participants in Japan. Also we would like to thank Jennifer Burt and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions
on this manuscript.
# 2013 The Experimental Psychology Society

1

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VERDONSCHOT ET AL.

Reading aloud words is a task that is carried out
seemingly easily and rapidly. However, the underlying process mechanisms are complex and needto deal with various forms of ambiguity, including
the processing of heterophonic homographs (identically written words having more than one pronunciation, e.g., “dove” in “a dove [dʌv] is a bird” and“he dove [dəʊv] into the sea”). In Indo-European
languages such as English it has been shown thatthese words are named slower than their matched
controls (even when context was provided), whichmight be due to competition between the simultaneously activated alternative pronunciations(Folk & Morris, 1995; Gottlob, Goldinger,
Stone, & Van Orden, 1999; Kawamoto &Zemblidge, 1992; Seidenberg, Waters, Barnes, &Tanenhaus, 1984). Another example of ambiguity
can be found in exception words (i.e., words that
do not consistently follow orthography-to-phonology conversion, OPC, rules, e.g., STEAK). Thesewords are named more slowly than words that obey
OPC rules like BEAK and PEAK, most likely due
to a conﬂict between the stored knowledge of theword’s pronunciation and OPC regularities for
similar orthographic patterns (Glushko, 1979;
Stanovich & Bauer, 1978; see also Seidenberg
et al., 1984). Waters and Seidenberg (1985) replicated these ﬁndings, but only found the consistency
effect for low-frequency words. However, Jared(1997) reported consistency effects for high-frequency words as well.
In an inﬂuential paper, Wydell, Butterworth,and Patterson (1995) extended these investigations
to Japanese kanji, which have distinctly different
properties to those of alphabetic scripts. Modern
Japanese uses three scripts: moraic hiragana andkatakana (together called kana) and logographic
kanji. Lexical morphemes, such as nouns and theroots of verbs and adjectives, are usually written
in kanji, whereas grammatical morphemes (e.g.,
inﬂections and function words) are written in hiragana, and alphabetic loanwords are usually written
in katakana. Kanji pronunciations are divided into
two types: ON readings, derived from the
Chinese pronunciation, and KUN readings native
to Japanese. Importantly, approximately 60% of
the 1,945 commonly used kanji (Tamaoka,

2

Kirsner, Yanase, Miyaoka, & Kawakami, 2002)
are heterophonic homographs (i.e., they haveboth ON and KUN readings) for which the pronunciations depend on the intraword or sentence
context. According to Tamaoka et al., (2002),
kanji that have only ON or only KUN readings,
regardless of the number of pronunciations, total
779 (739 for ON reading and 40 for KUN
reading), or about 40% of the basic kanji.
Usually, there is a tendency that when a kanji
character stands alone, the KUN pronunciation isused (e.g., 水 /mizukun/ “water”; subscript denoting
the type), and when a kanji is part of a compound,
the ON reading is used. However, there are many
exceptions to this rule (e.g., the kanji “水” in 海
水, /kaion-suion/ “seawater”, and 雨水, /amakunmizukun/ “rainwater”). For some kanji, themeaning changes when the pronunciation
changes but there are also many kanji for which
this is not the case (as many Sino-Japanese andoriginal Japanese pronunciations essentially carry
the same meaning).
Wydell et al. (1995) deﬁned consistency interms of print-to-sound correspondences (i.e.,having one or more ON and/or KUN readings).
For instance, words including the character 水were termed “inconsistent” as the pronunciationof 水 varies across its orthographic neighbourhood.
Consistent words were words for which there
would be, for example, just one pronunciation foreach character (e.g., 駅員 /ekion-inon/ “station
attendant”). Wydell et al. (1995) did not ﬁnd any
consistency effects in word-naming latencies
across ﬁve experiments using two-kanji words andone experiment using single-kanji words. Hencethey concluded that the computation of phonology
from a written kanji is mainly computed at thewhole word (i.e., compound) level and not at thelevel of its subcomponents (i.e., individual kanji).
However, using a somewhat different approach,
other researchers such as Fushimi, Ijuin,Patterson, and Tatsumi (1999) did ﬁnd signiﬁcantconsistency effects. Particularly, when typicality was
introduced as a factor (i.e., how often a kanji
appears with a speciﬁc pronunciation at a speciﬁc
position in a compound), signiﬁcant consistency
effects were found when Japanese compound

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THE MULTIPLE PRONUNCIATIONS OF JAPANESE KANJI

words and nonwords were named. This led to thecontrasting interpretation that pronunciation processing can be affected by character–sound correspondences at the subcomponent level (individual
kanji) and not only at the whole-word level.
However, it is important to appreciate that amajor difference between previous consistency
experiments in English (e.g., Glushko, 1979;
Jared, McRae, & Seidenberg, 1990) and Japanese(Fushimi et al., 1999; Wydell et al., 1995) pertains
to the fact that English stimuli examined wereusually single words, and Japanese stimuli were
mostly compounds. As Wydell et al. (1995,
p. 1157) put it: “comparing ‘HASTE vs.
CASTE’ in English would in Japanese be similar
to comparing compounds such as ‘BOW-TIE’ vs.
‘BOW-WOW’ or ‘LEAD-IN’ vs. ‘LEADFREE’”. This may be an essential difference as
there is still an ongoing debate regarding whether
compound words are stored in a decomposed way—that is, stored in terms of their constituent morphemes at the lexical–phonological or lexeme level(Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999) or in their fullform (Caramazza, 1997). For instance, Bien,
Levelt, and Baayen (2005), using a speech preparation task, found that Dutch participants are sensitive to a compound’s constituent morpheme
frequency,
indicating
decomposedstorage.
However, another study by Janssen, Bi, andCaramazza (2008) used picture naming in
Chinese and English to verify whether manipulating the frequency of a compound’s constituentsinﬂuences reaction times. In both Chinese andEnglish, they found no evidence of storage interms of their constituents, supporting the fullform storage account (e.g., Caramazza, 1997).
Additionally, there are scholars who havesuggested a single-route approach including a
number of processing stages (obligatory decomposition, e.g., Taft, 2004). Others have suggested
dual-route models, which assume parallel (and/orinteractive) processing of the full form of a compound word and its constituents (e.g., Baayen &Schreuder, 1999; Kuperman, Schreuder, Bertram,& Baayen, 2009). The latter authors, for instance,
used eye tracking to establish the time course ofprocessing Dutch polymorphemic compoundwords. They found early compound frequency
effects, indicating that not all constituents needed
to be accessed before the word-identifying process
started, but also found interactions between (a)the compound frequency versus left-constituent
frequency and (b) the number of combinations
the left constituent could make with the right constituent versus the frequency of the right constituents. These ﬁndings indicate that both compound(i.e., full-form) information and constituent (i.e.,
decompositional) information inﬂuence eachother and may therefore not be independent(Kuperman et al., 2009). Although the debate isclearly not settled yet, it should be noted that therelative importance of representations at particularlevels may depend on the morphological complexityof a language (e.g., Chinese being a syllabic
language).
As indicated earlier, there is presently mixed evidence regarding whether or not consistency as afactor independently exerts an effect on naming
latencies when reading aloud Japanese kanji words
or whether effects only can be obtained whenother factors such as “typicality” are introduced.
Additionally, as multiple pronunciations are therule rather than the exception in Japanese, it may
be that although multiple pronunciations are activated, Japanese speakers may simply address suchconditions more efﬁciently and hence not show
any processing differences between kanji characterswith one or multiple readings. This is in line withdata from Wydell et al. (1995). For instance, in
their Experiment 5, these authors used single
kanji, which were usually read using their KUN
reading. These kanji could have either a single
alternative (ON) reading or two alternative (ON)readings. Naming latencies did not differ between
these two kanji categories, indicating that either
no activation had spread to the alternative
reading, or that alternative readings had little
impact. In their study, however, it was not clear
what the KUN/ON dominance ratios were—that
is, whether the alternative readings for theirstimuli were frequent or rare (see Nomura, 1978;
Tamaoka & Makioka, 2004). This information
may be important, as Kayamoto, Yamada, andTakashima (1998) reported mixed results for

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VERDONSCHOT ET AL.

single kanji naming, which crucially depended on
the relative frequencies of the alternative readings.
In their ﬁrst experiment, participants were asked
to name kanji that had only one reading—that is,
駅 /ekion/ “station”—versus kanji that had multiple
readings—that is, 雄 /osukun/ (free-morpheme) or/yuuon/ (bound-morpheme) both of which mean
“male”. Kayamoto et al. used high-frequency andmidfrequency kanji and found in both cases alarge increase in naming latency for kanji with multiple readings compared to kanji with single readings (63 ms and 88 ms, respectively) even thoughmost alternative readings were not free morphemes.
Additionally, in some cases, when naming rapidly,
participants even mistakenly pronounced a blend ofboth readings, such as /oyuu/ for 雄, mixing up
KUN reading of /osu/ and ON reading of /yuu/.
Importantly, in the ﬁrst experiment of
Kayamoto et al. (1998), the alternative readings(ON) had a high frequency of occurrence, which
may have caused the observed difference innaming latency between the multiple-reading andsingle-reading kanji. To investigate this issue, inExperiment 2 the authors examined kanji with asubordinate (weaker) alternative reading andhence a stronger dominant reading. Using thesestimuli, the competition effect disappeared—that
is, reading kanji with multiple readings only took
(a statistically nonsigniﬁcant) 10 ms more thanreading single pronunciation kanji. Kayamoto
et al. (1998) concluded that competition between
readings created the processing cost in their ﬁrst
experiment, and the absence of competition in
their second experiment was due to insufﬁcientstrength of the rival reading to be a competitor to
the dominant reading.
It is important to realize that Kayamoto et al.
(1998) and Fushimi et al. (1999) needed to makea critical assumption regarding consistency effects—namely, that more than one pronunciation was
activated at some point in processing the word.
However, this is not directly established by theirdata. The current study therefore aims to obtain
direct evidence on whether or not multiple readingsof a single kanji character become active. Studying
this phenomenon using Japanese scripts provides
an excellent opportunity, as most kanji essentially4have more than one pronunciation, which makes
stimulus selection easy (opposed to English or
Dutch). Also, importantly, prime pronunciations
can be transcribed in one of the kana scripts (i.e.,
hiragana or katakana) without invoking any orthographic overlap. Additionally, we aim to investigate
whether the strength of the alternative reading
plays a role. For example, is activation of morethan one pronunciation detectable even whenalternative pronunciations are weak (have a low
frequency).
We report the results of two masked priming
experiments using kanji primes and their KUN
and ON transcriptions in katakana. The ﬁrst experiment employs kanji with two readings, which havean equal dominance ratio (DR; in compounds;
taken from the 2004 database by Tamaoka andMakioka downloadable from http://www.lang.
nagoya-u.ac.jp/~ktamaoka/). This experiment issimilar to Kayamoto et al.’s (1998) ﬁrst experiment,
as dominant and alternative readings were comparable in frequency of occurrence. In the ﬁrst experiment, we also manipulated masking duration—that is, we included trials with and without a backward mask (consisting of three hash marks, ###,
lasting for 50 ms). This was done in case activation
spreading for one of the pronunciations would takelonger to build up. In this way, we could investigate
whether prolonging activation spreading (without
extending the actual prime exposure duration)
might allow alternative pronunciations to emerge
in case they would not in trials without a backwardmask. The second experiment employs kanji, which
are biased to one of the pronunciations. That is, thedominant reading is much more frequent than thealternative reading. In that sense, it is comparable
to the second experiment of Kayamoto et al.
(1998).
Our hypotheses are straightforward: If native
Japanese speakers activate multiple pronunciations
when processing a kanji prime with alternative
readings, then the naming of the transcriptions ofboth readings in katakana when preceded by thesame congruent kanji prime should show facilitation compared to control primes (e.g., both ミ
ズ andスイshould beneﬁt from the 水prime compared to an unrelated prime). If the activation of

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THE MULTIPLE PRONUNCIATIONS OF JAPANESE KANJI

nondominant readings is limited or absent, we
expect the priming effect for the nondominant
katakana transcription (スイfor 水) to be smalleror absent compared to the effect for the dominant
katakana transcription (ミズ for 水). Such a
result would assist in accounting for the absenceof processing costs in earlier studies such as
Wydell et al. (1995) and Kayamoto et al. (1998;
Experiment 2). Furthermore, as the task involves
the speech production apparatus (i.e., reading
aloud katakana strings), it will also provide insights
into the production processes involved when speakers are faced with potentially competitive
pronunciations.

EXPERIMENT 1: READING ALOUDKATAKANA TARGETS PRECEDEDBY KANJI PRIMES WITH EQUALREADING PREFERENCE
We employed a katakana word-naming task preceded by masked kanji primes. Masked priming isassumed to prevent possible strategic inﬂuences,which may hinder or bias the results (Forster &Davis, 1984). This ﬁrst experiment was performed
using kanji, which, in compounds, have an approximately equal (or balanced) dominance ratio for one
or the other pronunciation. If there is indeed concurrent activation of multiple readings, then kanji
having approximately balanced readings are likely
candidates to detect this.

MethodParticipants
Forty undergraduate students from Hiroshima
University (23 female, 17 male; average age 20.5
years; SD = 1.8) took part in this experiment inexchange for ﬁnancial compensation. All participants were native speakers of Japanese and hadnormal or corrected-to-normal vision.
StimuliTwenty-nine kanji primes with two possible pronunciations were selected, which adhered to an
equal KUN/ON dominance ratio (henceforthcalled DR) of between 40% and 60% (meansummed average 50.9%)—that is, a kanji characteris pronounced approximately equally often with the
Sino-Japanese (ON) and the native Japanese(KUN) reading in compound words (for a detailed
description of how this statistic is obtained see
Tamaoka et al., 2002, p. 272). Although there isa strong bias towards the KUN reading for standalone kanji, if activation does spread unhindered
to more than one pronunciation upon seeing akanji, there will be a good chance of obtaining signiﬁcant priming for the alternative (ON) pronunciation as well (in kanji having DRs between 40
and 60%). Target strings were katakana transcriptions of the KUN and ON reading for a kanji character—for instance, 町 (city or block) wastranscribed as マチ /matikun/ (KUN target) andチョウ /tyooon/ (ON target). We chose to transcribe words into katakana instead of hiragana to
avoid tapping into lexical processes, as transcriptions into katakana are less familiar to participants
than are those into hiragana. Additionally, Hino,
Lupker, Ogawa, and Sears (2003) showed thatmasked repetition priming effects between kanji
and katakana can be obtained reliably. Twentynine kanji control primes were selected, which
had one (i.e., ON) preferred reading and were phonologically and semantically unrelated to thetargets. The summed kanji frequencies(Yokoyama, Sasahara, Nozaki, & Long, 1998) ofrepetition and control primes were equated asmuch as possible, with a mean summed character
frequency of 631.4 for repetition primes and598.4 for control primes, t(28) , 1, ns, as were
the summed stroke complexities, with a mean of
9.8 for repetition primes and 10.6 for control
primes, t(28) , 1. All kanji were taken from theset of 1,945 commonly used Japanese kanji as published by the Japanese government in 1981 (fordetailed information, see Tamaoka & Makioka,
2004; Yasunaga, 1981). Also we included a“neutral” condition, in which targets were not preceded by any prime but simply by percentage signs,
to verify whether the KUN or ON targets alreadyshowed a naming latency difference without theinﬂuence of a prime. See Appendix A for an overview of the materials used in this experiment.

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VERDONSCHOT ET AL.

DesignA 2 (backward mask: present or absent) × 2 (target
type, i.e., KUN and ON katakana target) × 3(prime type, i.e., congruent, control, or neutral)
within-participants factorial design was implemented.
Each participant saw 348 trials (2 × 2 × 3 × 29).
Four pseudorandom lists were constructed such thatphonologically or semantically related primes ortargets had at least a distance of two trials to avoid
unintended priming effects. Within participants, theorder of lists was counterbalanced. Half of the participants for a particular list saw the backward masking
condition ﬁrst, and the other half saw the condition
without backward masking ﬁrst.
Procedure
In all reported experiments, the software package Eprime 2.0 combined with a voice key was used forstimulus presentation and data acquisition.
Participants were seated approximately 60 cm
from a 17-inch LCD computer screen (Eizo
Flexscan P1700 with a screen cycle refresh rate of
60 Hz) in a quiet room at Hiroshima University
and were tested individually. A trial comprised thepresentation of a ﬁxation cross (1,000 ms) followed
by a forward mask—identical to the backward mask—for 500 ms, and subsequently a kanji prime(50 ms), replaced either immediately by the katakana target word (maximally three characterslong), which disappeared when the participant
responded or after maximally 2,000 ms, or by the
backward mask (50 ms), which in turn was replacedby the katakana target word. In between trials, a

random interstimulus interval of 400–800 ms wasintroduced to avoid expectancy effects. Naming
latencies were measured from target onset.
Participants were speciﬁcally instructed to respondas fast as possible while avoiding errors. They were
not informed about the presence of the prime.
After the experiment, as in earlier studies, informalinterviewing showed that participants were foundto be generally unable to recognize the primes
under the masking conditions used in this study(see also prime visibility tests reported by Schiller,
1998, 2004 under analogous conditions).
Participants were furthermore presented with aquestionnaire containing the kanji used in the experiment and were asked to write down their preferred
pronunciation of the kanji in a script of their choice(hiragana, katakana, or romaji).

Results and discussion
Naming latencies exceeding 2.5 standard deviations
per participant per backward mask were counted as
outliers (comprising 2.5% of the data). Separate
analyses were carried out with participants (F1)and items (F2) as random variables. In the F2 analysis, target type was considered to be a between-item
variable (necessitated by the KUN/ON transcriptions of the readings of the prime). In Table 1,mean reaction times (RTs) and error rates per condition are reported. Since there were only 0.93%
errors overall, distributed approximately equally
across conditions in Experiment 1, error percentages were not subjected to any statistical analysis.

Table 1. Mean naming latencies and percentage errors for Experiment 1 as a function of target type, prime duration, and experimental
condition
Prime condition

No-BWM RT+BWM RT%E

KUN reading (e.g., マチ “machi”)

Congruent (町)Control (式)Congruent–control

465 (44)482 (44)
18 (10)446 (43)465 (46)
19 (12)

0.1
0.0
0.1

ON reading (e.g., チョウ “tyoo”)

Congruent (町)Control (式)Congruent–control

471 (47)483 (47)
12 (9)

453 (46)460 (41)
7 (15)

0.0
0.1
−0.1

Katakana target

Note: RT = reaction time (naming latency), in ms. Standard deviations in parentheses. BWM = backward mask. %E = percentage
error.

6

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First, to rule out the possibility that there was adifference in bare naming latencies between KUN
or ON targets, we analysed the part in whichtargets were not preceded by a prime (i.e., the“neutral” condition). On these data we performeda 2 (backward mask) × 2 (target type) analysis ofvariance (ANOVA) analysis and found thatnaming latencies did not differ whether the target
was transcribed in the KUN or ON reading. Also
there was no interaction between backward mask
and target type (all Fs , 1). As RTs were indistinguishable when there was no prime preceding thetargets (indicating that bare KUN or ON naming
latencies did not differ), subsequent analyses were
performed without the neutral condition.
Subsequently, we performed a 2 (backward mask:present, absent) × 2 (target type) × 2 (prime type,i.e., congruent, control) analysis. There was a main
effect of backward mask. Introducing a backward
mask of 50 ms resulted in response latencies 19 ms
faster overall, F1(1, 39) = 23.37, MSE = 1,280.14,
p , .001; F2(1, 56) = 323.53, MSE = 88.1,
p , .001. There was no interaction between backward mask and any of the other variables (all Fs ,1 except the F-value in the three-way interactionin the participant analysis between backward mask,target type and prime type, F1(1, 39) = 2.52,
MSE = 76.3, ns; F2 , 1).
There was no effect of target type (KUN or
ON), F1(1, 39) = 3.120, MSE = 156.01; F2 , 1.
However, there was a signiﬁcant effect of prime
type, F1(1, 39) = 220.84, MSE = 70.7, p , .001;
F2(1, 56) = 48.1, MSE = 265.9, p , .001, and asigniﬁcant interaction between target type andprime type in the participant analysis, F1(1,39) = 22.6, MSE = 70.0, p , .001; but not theitems analysis, F2(1, 56) = 2.41, MSE = 110.1, ns.
Planned comparisons show that without the
backward mask, KUN targets were named 18 ms
faster when preceded by a related prime than whenpreceded by a control prime, t1(39) = 11.0, SD =10.2, p , .001; t2(28) = 4.8, SD = 20.2, p , .001,
and ON targets were named 12 ms faster when preceded by a related prime than when preceded by acontrol prime, t1(39) = 8.2, SD = 9.2, p , .001;
t2(28) = 5.3, SD = 18.8, p , .001. When the backward mask is introduced, KUN targets were named

19 ms faster when preceded by a related prime thanwhen preceded by a control prime, t1(39) = 9.4,
SD = 12.8, p , .001; t2(28) = 3.4, SD = 19.6,
p , .01, and ON targets were named 7 ms faster
when preceded by a related prime than when preceded by a control prime, t1(39) = 2.9, SD = 15.5,
p , .01; t2(28) = 3.0, SD = 18.9, p , .01.
It could be argued that as kanji primes wereselected such that they adhered to an approximatelybalanced DR, half of the participants may have preferred one speciﬁc reading and the other half theother reading, and hence we obtained priming
effects for both targets. This argument, however, is
not in line with the results of the item analysis nor
with the results of the questionnaire. If we look at
an item-by-item basis, then for KUN pronunciations
such as マチ /matikun/ (primes: 町 vs. 式), only 1 outof 40 participants did not show a priming effect, andfor ON pronunciations such asチョウ /tyooon/, thisnumber was 3 out of 40. Moreover, the questionnairedemonstrated that there was strong consensus(.90%) about the stand-alone pronunciation of the
kanji (i.e., almost all participants transcribed 町 as
/matikun/ and not as /tyooon/), indicating that thepriming effect for /tyooon/ is not due to the factthat this was the preferred stand-alone reading forhalf of the participants.
In this experiment we obtained clear evidence
that the same kanji prime concurrently activates
both its pronunciations—that is, both マチ/matikun/ and チョウ /tyooon/ show faster RTs
when preceded by 町 than when preceded by an
unrelated prime. There was suggestive evidence fora stronger facilitation effect for the KUN reading(however, the interaction was not signiﬁcant byitems). This may possibly be due to the fact thatthe kanji primes were presented in isolation, and isolated kanji usually take the KUN reading.

EXPERIMENT 2: READING ALOUDKATAKANA STRINGS PRECEDED BY
KANJI PRIMES HAVING EQUAL AND
HIGH-ON/HIGH-KUN READINGS
It is conceivable that the obtained facilitation effectobserved in Experiment 1 for both ON and KUN

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VERDONSCHOT ET AL.

targets is only obtained for kanji that have an equal
dominance ratio (e.g., Kayamoto et al., 1998).
Therefore, in Experiment 2 we examined whether
or not evidence for activation of multiple pronunciations could also be obtained for kanji, whichhave a preference/bias towards one of the readings.
Furthermore, control primes in Experiment 1 typically took only one (ON) reading (according to the
Joyo kanji list, e.g., 式), which might have potentially affected the results. This was resolved inExperiment 2 in which both congruent andcontrol primes take multiple readings.
In order to ascertain that the ﬁndings ofExperiment 1 are replicable, Experiment 2
included kanji primes that have an equal DR in
addition to kanji primes that have a bias towards
either the ON or the KUN reading. This offers
the advantage of a comparison between thesethree types of DR within the same group of participants. Experiment 2 sought also to resolve somemethodological issues concerning Experiment 1
such as the many repetitions of stimulus materials
in that experiment. As Experiment 1 did notshow any interaction between backward mask andother variables, the backward mask was left out toreduce the number of repetitions. As kanji primes
are selected that have a bias towards a speciﬁc
reading (KUN or ON), there are two possibilities:(a) The prime spreads more activation to the dominant pronunciation than to the nondominant pronunciation, which will result in more facilitation
for the dominant one, (b) the KUN reading willbe always the most highly activated one as all
primes are single kanji (default = KUN).
However, in that case, the ON-biased condition
should still show more priming for the ON
reading than the KUN-biased condition does.

MethodParticipants
Twenty-eight undergraduate students from
Nagoya University (12 female; mean age: 19
years; SD = 3.6) took part in Experiment 2 inexchange for ﬁnancial compensation. All participants were native speakers of Japanese and hadnormal or corrected-to-normal vision.

8

Stimuli
Three prime bias groups of kanji were created.
Sixteen kanji primes with two possible pronunciations were selected, which adhered to a DR of
between 40% and 60% (equal-kanji; mean sum:
53.6%; DRs can be found in Tamaoka &Makioka, 2004). Furthermore, 16 kanji primes
were selected, which had a DR for the KUN
reading between 70% and 90% (high-KUN kanji;mean sum: 78.0%) and also 16 kanji primes that
had a DR for the ON reading between 70% and
90% (high-ON kanji; mean sum 79.8%), with amean summed character frequency of 433.4 forrepetition primes and 400.7 for control primes, F(4, 90) = 1.1, ns, and summed mean stroke complexity (9.7 for repetition vs. 10.2 for control
primes), F(4, 90) = 1.4, ns. Generally, the averagefrequency of occurrence of the ON-transcribedkatakana target words was higher than that of the
KUN-target words, which is due to kanji homophony being much higher for ON than for KUN
readings (e.g., the string /shinon/ occurs more frequently than the string /morikun/ in Japanese;
Tamaoka, 2005). However, the mean summed
homophone count was statistically not different
between the ON-target items in the equal group(13.2), high-ON group (11.8), and high-KUN
group (17.6), F(2, 45) = 1.2, ns. Appendix B provides an overview of all stimuli used inExperiment 2.

DesignA 3 (prime bias, i.e., equal, high-ON, and highKUN) × 2 (target type, i.e., KUN or ON katakanatarget) × 2 (prime type, i.e., congruent and control)
within-participants
factorial
designwas
implemented. Each participant received half ofthe experimental trials (equalling 96 trials)
showing each target (KUN and ON) only once to
avoid repetition (all conditions appeared equallyoften). For each participant individually, a pseudorandomized list was created such that phonologically(e.g., 皮 /kawa/ and 髪 /kami/) or semanticallyrelated primes (e.g., 魚 “ﬁsh” and 鳥 “bird”) andphonologically related targets (e.g., カベ /kabe/and カワ /kawa/) had at least a distance of two

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trials to avoid unintended priming effects. Acrossparticipants, the design was complete.

Procedure
In all reported experiments, the software package
E-prime 2.0 combined with a voice key was used
for stimulus presentation and data acquisition.
Participants were seated approximately 60 cm
from a 17-inch LCD computer screen (Eizo
Flexscan P1700; 60 Hz) in a quiet room at
Nagoya University and were tested individually.
A trial comprised the presentation of a ﬁxation
cross for 1,000 ms, followed by a forward maskfor 500 ms, and subsequently a kanji prime of
50 ms, replaced immediately by the katakanatarget word (maximally three characters long),
which disappeared when the participant responded
or after maximally 2,000 ms. In between trials, a
random interstimulus interval of 400–800 ms
was introduced to avoid expectancy effects.
Naming latencies were measured from target
onset. Participants were speciﬁcally instructed torespond as fast as possible while avoiding errors.
They were not informed about the presence ofthe prime. After the experiment, informal interviewing showed that participants were unable torecognize the primes under the masking conditions used in this experiment.

Results
Naming latencies exceeding 2.5 standard deviations
per participant per backward mask were counted as
outliers (comprising 1.2% of the data). Error rates
in Experiment 2 were low (0.8%) and again were
distributed approximately equally across conditions; therefore they were not analysed. In theF2 analysis, prime bias and target type were considered to be between-item variables. In Table 2,mean RTs and error rates per condition arereported.
Mean RTs were submitted to a 3 (prime bias:
equal, high-KUN, high-ON) × 2 (target type:KUN or ON) × 2 (prime type: congruent vs.
control) repeated measures ANOVA. There was amain effect of prime type, F1(1, 27) = 35.7,
MSE = 499.9, p , .001; F2(1, 90) = 40.5,
MSE = 236.3, p , .001, reﬂecting the fact thatcongruent primes induced a 14-ms facilitation
effect compared to the control primes, and there
was a main effect of prime bias, F1(2, 54) = 10.2,
MSE = 270.6, p , .001; F2(2, 90) = 4.1, MSE =419.9, p , .05, reﬂecting the fact that targets preceded by high-ON primes were named about
9 ms slower than those in the other two prime
bias conditions.
There was a signiﬁcant interaction between
prime bias and prime type in the participant

Table 2. Mean naming latencies and percentage errors for Experiment 2 as a function of prime bias, target type, and prime type
Target type
KUN

ON

Prime bias

Prime type

RT (SD)%E

RT (SD)%E

Equal DR(マチ/チョウ)Congruent (e.g., 町)
Control (e.g., 沢)Congruent–control

449 (59)468 (73)−19 (28)

0.0
0.1
−0.1

450 (62)464 (63)−14 (23)

0.0
0.0
0.0

KUN biased DR(モリ/シン)

Congruent (e.g., 森)
Control (e.g., 鉄)
Congruent–control

453 (62)466 (62)−13 (26)

0.0
0.1
−0.1

456 (60)
460 (62)−4 (26)

0.0
0.2
−0.2

ON biased DR(ツミ/ザイ)Congruent (e.g., 罪)Control (e.g., 則)
Congruent–control

456 (54)479 (65)−23 (22)

0.1
0.0
−0.1

460 (58)472 (62)−12 (22)

0.1
0.1
0.0

Note: DR = dominance ratio. RT = reaction time (naming latency), in ms. Standard deviations in parentheses. %E = percentage error.
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VERDONSCHOT ET AL.

analysis, F1(2, 54) = 3.8, MSE = 188.5, p , .05,
but not in the item analysis, F2(2, 90) = 1.4,
MSE = 236.3, ns, indicating that the priming
effects were numerically less in the high-KUN
prime condition (9 ms) than in the equal (17 ms)
and high-ON (18 ms) prime-bias conditions(although this effect was not consistent overitems). There was a marginal interaction between
Target Type × Prime Type, F1(1, 27) = 4.1,
MSE = 341.3, p = .052; F2(1, 90) = 3.1, MSE =236.3, p = .078, suggesting that KUN targets may
obtain more priming than ON targets when kanji
primes are shown in isolation. All other interactions, including the three-way interaction
between prime bias, target type, and prime type,
did not reach signiﬁcance, all Fs , 1.
Planned comparisons showed that in the equalgroup, both the KUN targets (19 ms), t1(27) =3.6, SD = 27.8, p , .001, t2(15) = 3.4, SD =22.0, p , .01, and the ON targets (14 ms),t1(27) = 3.3, SD = 23.5, t2(15) = 2.3, SD = 24.2,
p , .05, showed signiﬁcant priming from relatedcompared to unrelated primes. For the high-ON
group the same pattern was found—that is, KUN(23 ms), t1(27) = 5.7, SD = 22.2, p , .001;
t2(15) = 4.7, SD = 18.7, p , .001, and ON
targets (12 ms), t1(27) = 2.9, SD = 22.2, p , .01;t2(15) = 2.5, SD = 20.3, p , .05, both gave rise tosigniﬁcant priming. However, this pattern could
not be convincingly found for the high-KUN
group, with signiﬁcant priming in the KUN
targets (13 ms) subjects, t1(27) = 2.7, SD = 26.4,
p , .05, and marginally in the items analysis,t2(15) = 2.0, SD = 27.3, p = .06, and priming
was absent for the ON targets (4 ms), t1(27) , 1,
t2(15) = 1.0, SD = 16.0, ns.
In the equal prime bias group we replicated themain ﬁnding of Experiment 1 that congruent
primes facilitated the naming of both target types(KUN and ON). For example, マチ /matikun/
and チョウ /tyooon/ again showed signiﬁcant
facilitation when preceded by a congruent prime(町) in comparison to a control prime. Although
the lack of a Prime Bias × Prime Type × Target
Type and of a Prime Bias × Target Type interaction indicates that both KUN and ON readings
were facilitated by a congruent prime compared to10control prime irrespective of the prime bias condition, subsequent planned comparisons did showthat the ON targets in the high-KUN prime bias
condition were not signiﬁcantly facilitated.
Although there is no conclusive statisticalsupport for greater priming for KUN targets thanfor ON targets, the numerical difference andplanned comparisons do seem to point in thisdirection. This ﬁnding would theoretically makesense as single kanji characters usually take the
KUN reading, and therefore an overall bias
towards the KUN reading, even in the high-ON
DR group, and hence more priming of the KUN
reading, may be expected. However, it seems warranted to ﬁnd corroborating evidence for the presence of a Target Type × Prime Type interaction in
future research.
The primary source of the interactive trend forprime bias and prime type was the weaker priming
in the high-KUN prime bias condition. Although
it is difﬁcult to assess the nature of this pattern, apossible and parsimonious account is that (a) ONtargets did not show signiﬁcant priming, and (b)as primes were standing alone (hence favouring the
KUN reading), the priming of the KUN reading
may have quickly reached its maximum and is forthat reason not larger than in the other two prime
bias conditions, whereas its bias towards KUN did
cause less spreading of activation towards its ON
reading. However, the important ﬁnding is, again,that despite of this KUN bias in reading isolated
kanji, ON readings for the equal and ON-biased
groups were signiﬁcantly facilitated, a pattern thatwould not be observed if only one pronunciation
received activation.

GENERAL DISCUSSION
There is currently mixed evidence for the idea thatreading Japanese kanji takes more time when thecharacters have multiple pronunciations thanwhen they only have one pronunciation (Fushimi
et al., 1999; Kayamoto et al., 1998; Wydell et al.,1995). In this study, we examined the underlying
mechanism of kanji processing in more detail bydetermining whether in the processing of

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THE MULTIPLE PRONUNCIATIONS OF JAPANESE KANJI

heterophonic kanji both pronunciations become
activated (primed). In addition, we examined
whether the size of a potential priming effect may
be affected by the dominance ratio, the relative frequency of the KUN and ON readings (in compound words). To this end we employed two
masked priming experiments using katakana transcriptions as targets for each of the pronunciationsof the congruent kanji primes. We hypothesizedthat if multiple readings for kanji are activated inparallel, it should be possible to use these primes
to facilitate multiple targets (by comparing congruent to control primes for each target). Additionally
we hypothesized that if the alternative readings are
not dominant, priming may be less or even absent.
The results of the two experiments clearly show
parallel activation of two pronunciations.
However, as we used single kanji primes in our
experiments the ON/KUN dominance ratio incompound words may perhaps not have been thebest predictor of the relative activation spreading
to the two pronunciations. Furthermore, there is
the possibility that the activation of phonologicalrepresentations of kanji characters is sensitive topositional information. That is, the strength ofphonological activation when a character is presented in isolation may be different from thestrength of phonological activation when thesame character is presented as the ﬁrst or second
constituent of a compound.1 Therefore, it is necessary in future experiments to establish whether asimilar pattern of results is found when the kanji
characters used as primes form part of a compound.
This has the additional advantage that for compound words, the frequency of occurrence of theconstituents is directly available in the literature.
Despite these considerations, we believe that theunique nature of Japanese kanji having multiple
readings can be used to inform the debate about
how compounds are processed (i.e., full-form,
decomposed, or dual-route). Our results showthat in Japanese kanji more than one pronunciation
receives activation, as we found that ON readings(which are typically bound morphemes in our
stimuli) also show signiﬁcant priming (i.e., across1

Experiment 1, and the equal DR and high-ON
group in Experiment 2) even when primes were
presented in isolation. As these pronunciations
would have unlikely to have been the accurate pronunciations for the stand-alone prime when shown
directly (e.g., Japanese will probably not say /suion/to 水), this does suggest that all constituents receive
activation (although experiments using compound
stimuli should be undertaken to assess the natureof phonological activation when a character stands
alone or forms part of a compound).
Relevant information regarding this matter isprovided by Tamaoka and Hatsuzuka (1995) who
manipulated the frequency of individual kanji
while controlling for overall compound frequency.
In their experiments, compound words were presented in four conditions: (a) Left and right kanji
were both high frequency—for example, 運送/unon.sooon/ “transport”; (b) left was low, andright was high frequency—for example, 儀式/gion.sikion/ “ceremony”; (c) left was high, andright was low—for example, 軍曹 /gunon.sooon/;or (d) both were low frequency—for example, 我慢 /gaon.manon/. They found that reading aloudcompound words with a high ﬁrst-constituent frequency was faster (30 ms) than for those with a low
ﬁrst-constituent frequency, while this effect wasabsent for the second constituent in reading aloud(but present in a lexical decision task). However,Tamaoka and Hatsuzuka did not control for DR
and total number of readings for each constituent,which the current ﬁndings indicate to be a potentially important other factor.
Our ﬁndings consistently showed that kanji
characters activate multiple phonological representations. The competition that might be the result of
this may be responsible for the increased wordnaming latencies for heterophonic homographs,
observed in some studies (Folk & Morris, 1995;
Gottlob et al., 1999; Kawamoto & Zemblidge,
1992; Seidenberg et al., 1984). It is important tonote that the priming effects we reported surfaced
in experiments in which there was no direct task
on the kanji (as they were masked primes).
Instead, in our task the activation spreading fromWe thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out to us.
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VERDONSCHOT ET AL.

a kanji prime to the target reading (KUN or ON)
only adds to the large amount of activation that
this target reading (KUN or ON) receives fromthe visually presented katakana target. Given
these conditions, the activation of the competing
reading (the reading that does not correspond to
the katakana target) is most likely insufﬁcient toinﬂuence the selection of the correct reading.
This situation differs from the situation in the
Kayamoto et al. (1998) and Fushimi et al. (1999)
studies in which participants were asked to namethe kanji words directly. In this situation, the tworeadings of the target only receive activation fromthe target, which makes it more probable that theactivation of the incorrect, competing reading
delays the selection of the correct one. Recent
studies from our lab showed that when kanji characters needed to be named, superimposed, semantically (Verdonschot, La Heij, & Schiller, 2010)
and phonologically (Verdonschot, La Heij,
Paolieri, Zhang, & Schiller, 2011) related context
pictures facilitated naming in comparison to unrelated pictures. In line with the conclusion from
Kayamoto et al. (1998), we proposed a selection
cost for multiple reading kanji (in contrast to
English, Dutch, and Chinese), especially when
the DR was equal (50%) thereby allowing context
pictures to exert an effect. In future experiments,
it would be useful to have ON reading katakanaprimes paired with single kanji targets to be
named in their KUN reading. For example, 水
can be pronounced as /mizukun/ or /suion/ butwhen it stands alone it will always be pronounced
as /mizukun/. Therefore, if one uses水as thetarget, the ON reading prime such asスイ /suion/
may make it more difﬁcult to name that kanji in
its KUN reading—that is, /mizukun/—than would
an unrelated prime. If this pattern is found, it provides evidence regarding a competitive nature ofphonological selection in naming Japanese kanji.
As mentioned above, our current ﬁndings canbe further extended by examining the processingof compound kanji where ON reading priming
can be studied without a stand-alone KUN inﬂuence. Additionally, parametric mapping of kanji
characters that have many pronunciations such as
上 /uekun/ (which can be pronounced in six

12different ways) will lead to a more detailed understanding of how pronunciations are accessed when
there are not one but many alternatives and potentially how the correct pronunciation can be
resolved.
Overall, we conclude that when native Japanese
speakers encounter kanji characters, multiple readings receive activation, particularly when kanji
primes have an equal DR. These pronunciations
can induce priming, as in our present study, orinterference (Kayamoto et al., 1998) dependingon the relative strengths of alternative readings
and the task at hand.
Original manuscript received 14 August 2012
Accepted revision received 22 January 2013
First published online 20 March 2013

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APPENDIX A
Stimulus materials from Experiment 1

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KUN target
サカナ (/sakana/)
タマ (/tama/)
カガミ (/kagami/)
ノキ (/noki/)
ネ (/ne/)ヤマ (/yama/)
フダ (/huda/)
バ (/ba/)クラ (/kura/)
ミ (/mi/)ムラ (/mura/)
ムシ (/musi/)
マチ (/mati/)
トリ (/tori/)
タ (/ta/)シマ (/sima/)
ケ (/ke/)カベ (/kabe/)ワ (/wa/)カワ (/kawa/)
ハル (/haru/)
カミ (/kami/)
ハタ (/hata/)
ヒル (/hiru/)
ソコ (/soko/)
ハラ (/hara/)
サマ (/sama/)
タケ (/take/)
フエ (/hue/)

ON target

Congruent prime

Control prime

ギョ (/gyo/)
ギョク (/gyoku/)
キョウ (/kyoo/)ケン (/ken/)
コン (/kon/)サン (/san/)サツ (/satu/)
ジョウ (/zyoo/)
ゾウ (/zoo/)
シン (/sin/)ソン (/son/)チュウ (/tyuu/)
チョウ (/tyoo/)
チョウ (/tyoo/)デン (/den/)トウ (/too/)モウ (/moo/)
ヘキ (/heki/)
リン (/rin/)
ヒ (/hi/)シュン (/syun/)
ハツ (/hatu/)
キ (/ki/)チュウ (/tyuu/)
テイ (/tei/)
フク (/huku/)
ヨウ (/yoo/)
ガク (/gaku/)
テキ (/teki/)

魚
玉
鏡
軒
根
山
札
場
蔵
身
村
虫
町
鳥
田
島
毛
壁
輪
皮
春
髪
旗
昼
底
腹
様
岳
笛

軸
僚
菌
脈
録
理
王
議
券
銀
論
卓
式
託
百
官
到
郡
順
誕
材
晩
詩
舎
刊
毒
課
糖
冗

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APPENDIX B
Stimulus materials from Experiment 2

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Prime bias

KUN target

ON target

Congruent prime

Control prime

Equal

ネ /ne/
タマ /tama/
シマ /sima/
カベ /kabe/
ワ /wa/
ハタ /hata/
ソコ /soko/
サマ /sama/
マチ /mati/
フダ ‘fuda’
ヤマ /yama/
ミ /mi/
ムラ /mura/
クラ /kura/
ハル /haru/
カワ /kawa/

コン /kon/
ギョク /gyoku/
トウ /too/
ヘキ /heki/
リン /rin/キ /ki/
テイ /tei/
ヨウ /yoo/チョウ /tyoo/
サツ ‘satsu’
サン /san/シン /sin/ソン /son/ゾウ /zoo/
シュン /syun/
ヒ /hi/

根
玉
島
壁
輪
旗
底
様
町
札
山
身
村
蔵
春
皮

右
油
先
晴
豊
乳
患
評
沢
薬
小
優
計
林
鮮
勉

KUN biased

モリ /mori/
カワ /kawa/
ユメ /yume/
ハシラ /hasira/
ハシ /hasi/
サカ /saka/
マド /mado/
ハナ /hana/
スジ /suzi/
イト /ito/ハナ /hana/
キリ /kiri/
シオ /sio/
ユキ /yuki/
スミ /sumi/
ウデ /ude/シン /sin/
セン /sen/ム /mu/
チュウ /tyuu/
キョウ /kyoo/
ハン /han/
ソウ /soo/
カ /ka/
キン /kin/シ /sin/ビ /bi/
ム /mu/
エン /en/
セツ /setu/
ボク /boku/
ワン /wan/

森
川
夢
柱
橋
坂
窓
花
筋
糸
鼻
霧
塩
雪
墨
腕

鉄
要
預
誠
歩
壊
斉
音
契
怖
呉
潤
捨
範
穏
昼

ON biased

タケ /take/
ツミ /tumi/
テラ /tera/
クルマ /kuruma/
タビ /tabi/
ミズ /mizu/
メシ /mesi/
ヌノ /nuno/
アサ /asa/
ワケ /wake/
ウシ /usi/
キミ /kimi/
ニワ /niwa/
モモ /momo/
タテ /tate/
チ /ti/

チク /tiku/
ザイ /zai/
ジ /zi/
シャ /sya/
リョ /ryo/
スイ /sui/
ハン /han/フ /hu/
マ /ma/
ヤク /yaku/
ギュウ /gyuu/
クン /kun/テイ /tei/
トウ /too/
ジュウ /zyuu/
ケツ /ketu/

竹
罪
寺
車
旅
水
飯
布
麻
訳
牛
君
庭
桃
縦
血

異
則
削
西
婚
投
括
透
昔
絡
童
酒
貴
囚
桜
希

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