Publications by authors named "Masahiro Yoshihara"

A key issue in recent visual word recognition literature is whether text rotation disrupts the early stages of orthographic processing. Previous research found no masked repetition priming effect when primes were rotated ≥90° in alphabetic languages. The present study investigated the impact of text rotation using logographic (two-character Japanese kanji) words.

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Previous masked translation priming studies, especially those with different-script bilinguals, have shown that cognates provide more priming than noncognates, a difference attributed to cognates' phonological similarity. In our experiments employing a word naming task, we examined this issue for Chinese-Japanese bilinguals in a slightly different way, using same-script cognates as primes and targets. In Experiment 1, significant cognate priming effects were observed.

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Article Synopsis
  • Native English readers experience faster recognition of present-tense targets after seeing past-tense verb primes, suggesting strong morphological connections in their language processing.
  • In contrast, it's uncertain if similar connections exist in non-native English speakers, prompting research on Japanese-English bilinguals to investigate this.
  • The study found that past-tense verb primes aided target recognition beyond orthographic similarities, indicating that bilinguals can form morphological links akin to native speakers as their proficiency improves, while also experiencing reduced reliance on orthographic cues.
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In attempting to understand mental processes, it is important to use a task that appropriately reflects the underlying processes being investigated. Recently, Verdonschot and Kinoshita (Memory & Cognition, 46, 410-425, 2018) proposed that a variant of the Stroop task-the "phonological Stroop task"-might be a suitable tool for investigating speech production. The major advantage of this task is that the task is apparently not affected by the orthographic properties of the stimuli, unlike other, commonly used, tasks (e.

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Norris, Kinoshita and colleagues (Kinoshita & Norris, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35(1), 1-18, 2009; Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 137(3), 434-455, 2010; Norris & Kinoshita, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63(1), 194-204, 2008) have suggested that the masked priming same-different task (SDT) is an excellent tool for studying the orthographic coding process because, in most circumstances, performance in that task is driven entirely by orthographic codes. More specifically, although evidence of phonological influences (i.e.

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In a masked priming word-naming task, a facilitation due to the initial-segmental sound overlap for 2-character kanji prime-target pairs was affected by certain orthographic properties (Yoshihara, Nakayama, Verdonschot, & Hino, 2017). That is, the facilitation that was due to the initial mora overlap occurred only when the mora was the whole pronunciation of their initial kanji characters (i.e.

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The present experiment provides an investigation of a promising new tool, the masked priming same-different task, for investigating the orthographic coding process. Orthographic coding is the process of establishing a mental representation of the letters and letter order in the word being read which is then used by readers to access higher-level (e.g.

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The present study investigated interactions between cognitive processes and finger actions called "kusho," meaning "air-writing" in Japanese. Kanji-culture individuals often employ kusho behavior in which they move their fingers as a substitute for a pen to write mostly done when they are trying to recall the shape of a Kanji character or the spelling of an English word. To further examine the visualization role of kusho behavior on cognitive processing, we conducted a Kanji construction task in which a stimulus (i.

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Using the masked priming paradigm, we examined which phonological unit is used when naming Kanji compounds. Although the phonological unit in the Japanese language has been suggested to be the mora, Experiment 1 found no priming for mora-related Kanji prime-target pairs. In Experiment 2, significant priming was only found when Kanji pairs shared the of their initial Kanji characters.

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Here, we describe a patient with primary peritoneal carcinoma (PPC) who developed a late, solitary brain metastasis. It is a case of a 68-year-old female presented with a 1-month history of progressive gait disturbance who had undergone a surgical resection of PPC five years prior, followed by adjuvant chemotherapy. An MRI revealed a 4.

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