Processing of Kanji and Kana characters within Japanese words

Two experiments were conducted to examine the temporal relationship between whole-word and character processing in Japanese. Two kinds of Japanese script were used as stimuli: Kanji, an ideographic script, and Kana, a syllabic script. In Experiment 1, Kanji word processing and Kanji character processing were examined using a successive visual comparison task. The whole-word advantage (Marmurek, 1986) was not found. In Experiment 2, Kana words and characters were used. As in Experiment 1, no whole-word advantage was found. The absence of the whole-word advantage is attributed to the fact that Kanji and Kana characters represent higher level units of processing than alphabetic letters. The difference between word and nonword processing was shown by manipulations of the visual similarity and the homophony between stimuli presented successively. Visual similarity affected both words and nonwords, whereas homophony affected words only.