The Mystery of the Japanese Language

This book aims to solve the mystery of Japanese language reading and to explain its implications for cognitive processes in reading. Japanese is unusual in using more than one script: the logographic Kanji characters and two forms of the moraic Kana characters. These characters are systematically mixed in normal adult texts. For this reason, there is a great deal of interest in the mechanisms of reading in Japanese, and Japanese reading is a peculiarly challenging test-bed for general theories of cognitive processes in reading. Different mechanisms are used to identify and interpret morphemes written in Kanji and Kana. Japanese readers constantly switch between them. This switching incurs costs. This book sets out to discover how Japanese readers switch while reading Japanese texts. Dr. Mohammed Shafiullah is a senior lecturer at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland