A Japanese logographic character frequency list for cognitive science research

This paper describes a Japanese logographic character (kanji) frequency lis t, which is based on an analysis of the largest recently available corpus o f Japanese words and characters. This corpus comprised a full year of morni ng and evening editions of a major newspaper, containing more than 23 milli on kanji characters and more than 4,000 different kanji characters. This pa per lists the 3,000 most frequent kanji characters, as well as an analysis of kanji usage and correlations between the present list and previous Japan ese frequency lists. The authors believe that. the present list will help r esearchers more accurately and efficiently control the selection of kanji c haracters in cognitive science research and interpret related psycholinguis tic data.