Japanese orthographic complexity and speech duration in a reading task

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Psycholinguistics
• Speech Science

Background:

• Orthographic form length influences speech duration in alphabetic languages.
• Previous research primarily focused on alphabetic writing systems, leaving gaps in understanding non-alphabetic languages.
• The orthographic duration effect's universality across different writing systems remains underexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the effect of orthographic complexity on speech duration in Japanese, a logographic language.
• To explore if units analogous to letter length, such as character count and pen strokes, impact spoken word duration.
• To determine if the orthographic duration effect extends beyond alphabetic writing systems.

Main Methods:

• Native Japanese speakers participated in a modified reading task.
• Participants read pairs of homophonous words differing in orthographic complexity (character count and pen strokes).
• Speech duration was measured via audio recordings.

Main Results:

• Two-character Japanese words were produced with significantly longer speech durations compared to one-character words.
• No significant effect of the number of pen strokes within a single character on speech duration was observed.
• The findings suggest a correlation between the number of orthographic units and speech duration.

Conclusions:

• The orthographic duration effect is not exclusive to alphabetic writing systems.
• Character count in logographic systems, similar to letter count in alphabetic systems, influences speech duration.
• This study provides cross-linguistic evidence for the impact of orthography on speech production.