[P3] Poster Presentation 3: Emotion, Motivation, Social Cognition, Language & Thinking

[P3-01] Effects of semantic transparency and processing order of kanji characters on the processing of Japanese compound words: Part 1

*Rika Mizuno¹, Takao Matsui¹ (1. Chubu University)

Keywords:Japanese compound words, semantic transparency, processing order

Mizuno and Matsui (2018) conducted a semantic categorization experiment in which participants assessed whether two-kanji words represented human entities (human words) or not (general words). Processing of human words with human second characters was not facilitated, but processing of general words with human second characters was inhibited. Compound processing may not be facilitated when a word and its second character share the same semantic category, but it may be inhibited when their categories differ, as word and second-character processing should finish simultaneously. However, it may have been that no facilitative effects were found because the semantic transparencies of human words with human characters and those with general characters did not differ. This study investigated semantic transparency in the stimulus words used in Mizuno and Matsui (2018) and confirmed that they were significantly different. Findings suggest the validity of the above discussion.