Effects of orthographic similarity in processing Japanese kanji

The present study examined whether the processing of orthographic information from two-kanji compound words is affected by contextual information. Twenty-four undergraduate and graduate Japanese students participated in each experiment. Experiment 1 used two-kanji compound words in a lexical decision task to study orthographic processing at the lexical level. Experiment 2 required participants to detect misspellings (i.e., incorrect kanji combinations) of two-kanji compound stimuli embedded in sentences. Experiment 3 used a semantic decision task. In this task, in addition to the sentences used in Experiment 2, contextually incorrect but existing kanji compound words were used as fillers in sentences. In all three tasks, orthographically similar nonwords ((sic) in place of the real word (sic)), caused longer reaction times and more errors than orthographically dissimilar nonwords ((sic)). However, post-hoc analysis of error rates among the three experiments showed that orthographic processing of orthographically similar nonwords presented individually seems to differ from when the same nonwords are embedded in sentences. This result suggests that contextual information does have an influence on orthographic processing.