Retrieving kanji from memory: Speakers of Korean and Chinese learning Japanese

The present study examined distinct characteristics of kanji representations in speakers of Korean (KLs) and Chinese (CLs) who were learning Japanese. Participants in the study were, in each native language, 12 persons at each of the following levels of Japanese kanji proficiency: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. Other participants in the present study were persons learning Japanese who had no previous knowledge of kanji (NKLs : 12 at a beginning level of proficiency, and 15 each at intermediate and advanced levels). Participants were asked to write as many kanji as possible in 15 minutes,and then asked about the cues they used to retrieve kanji from their memory. The results suggested that Chinese whose proficiency was advanced used more semantic cues than did Chinese whose kanji proficiency was at a beginning or intermediate level, whereas Koreans at all levels of proficiency used semantic cues. This suggests that kanji proficiency has no effect on the accessibility of the links between the conceptual representations and the related lexical representations in second-language acquisition for Koreans learning Japanese. It was also found that Koreans used kanji components that were smaller than radicals at the same rate as the participants who had no previous knowledge of kanji. These latter participants used smaller components more frequently than did Japanese speakers (N = 12 Ito & Wada, 1999a). These findings suggest that both Koreans and persons with no previous knowledge of kanji pay attention to the smaller components when they are memorizing kanji.