WORD PICTURE INTERFERENCE EFFECTS IN CHINESE, JAPANESE KANJI AND KANA, AND ENGLISH

Do the multiple (ON and KUN) readings of Japanese kanji induce a more direct visual to meaning association than Chinese hanji with only a si ngle phonetic code? The rate at which Japanese kanji and Chinese hanji access meaning and pronunciation was tested in comparison to the rate at which English words and photographs access verbal and semantic cod es. A Stroop-paradigm was employed where the pattern of disruption cau sed by the simultaneous presentation of incongruent photograph-word (J apanese, Chinese and English) pairs revealed the order of information access by each stimulus. It was found that the categorization of an ob ject (a semantic task) represented in a photograph caused severe inter ference by the presence of an incongruent word ONLY for the Japanese. In addition, naming photographic images (a phonetic task) in the prese nce of an incongruent word was also adversely affected in the Japanese case. There is greater disruption in the processing of similar stimul i than stimuli that are very different. Reading Japanese appears to ha ve something in common with the processing of photographs, which Chine se and English words do not. It is suggested that the ON/KUN aspect of kanji make it more ''semantically transparent'' than Chinese single p ronunciation hanji.