Cognitive Processing of Chinese characters, words, sentences and Japanese kanji and kana: An introduction

Abstract

Over the past fifty years or so the process-oriented approach has been used to explore the general properties of language systems within the framework of human cognition (Alegria, Holender, Morais & Radeau 1992). While much of this work in information processing deals with the English language, there is increasing realization that we need to understand better the similarities and differences in processing lexical items in different alphabetic language systems and also non-alphabetic systems such as Chinese and Japanese (Frost & Katz 1992).