Abstract

The present study investigates the effect of furigana on lexical inferencing. After completing a pretest to determine their knowledge of the target words, participants read a passage and completed a think-aloud protocol and questionnaire. The experimental group read a passage with furigana over all kanji words while the control group read a passage without furigana. The protocols were evaluated to determine the rate and quality of lexical inferences of 16 target kanji words. The results of the questionnaire were evaluated to determine participant perception of passage and kanji difficulty, self-assessed percentage of the story that was understood, and the degree to which they liked the story. It was found that the group with furigana made more correct inferences than the control group. It was also found that the furigana group perceived the kanji in the passage to be easier than the control group did. Furigana did not seem to affect the degree to which the participants liked the story, their perception of the difficulty of the story or the percentage of the story that they understood. Implications for theory and pedagogy are discussed.

Degree

College and Department

Humanities; Center for Language Studies

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