Koji Miwa

Nagoya University | Meidai · Graduate School of Humanities

This lexical decision study with eye tracking of Japanese two-kanji-character words investigated the order in which a whole two-character word and its morphographic constituents are activated in the course of lexical access, the relative contributions of the left and the right characters in lexical decision, the depth to which semantic radicals are...

Previous priming studies suggest that, even for bilinguals of languages with different scripts, non-selective lexical activation arises. This lexical decision eye-tracking study examined contributions of frequency, phonology, and meaning of L1 Japanese words on L2 English word lexical decision processes, using mixed-effects regression modeling. The...

This lexical decision with eye-tracking study investigated how Japanese trimorphemic compounds (e.g., 体温計 ‘clinical thermometer’) are recognized. The questions answered were, in the course of decomposing and composing Japanese trimorphemic compounds, (1) whether recognition processes are tuned for a specific branching direction, (2) whether the mor...

This lexical decision eye-tracking study investigated whether horizontal and vertical readings elicit comparable behavioral patterns and whether reading directions modulate lexical processes. Response times and eye movements were recorded during a lexical decision task with Japanese bimorphemic compound words presented vertically. The data were the...

This paper introduces the generalized additive mixed model (GAMM) and the quantile generalized additive mixed model (QGAMM) through reanalyses of bilinguals’ lexical decision data from Dijkstra et al. (2010) and Miwa et al. (2014). We illustrate how regression splines can be used to test for nonlinear effects of cross-language similarity in form as...

Events can be perceived from different perspectives. Langacker, Ronald W. (1990. Subjectification. Cognitive Linguistics 1. 5–38) typologically categorised the perspectives in event construal as subjective construal and objective construal based on how egocentric a perspective is. Compared with Western languages, such as English, Japanese is argued...

The current study intends to deepen our understanding of language and thought interface by comparing the recognition memory of event roles between Japanese and English speakers. Previous research has shown that Japanese prioritises animacy over agency when choosing the subject of a sentence, with human entities being more likely to be chosen as th...

Once Japanese students enter university, the computer keyboard becomes a frequently used mode of writing. However, it is not clear whether the choice between handwriting and keyboarding has cognitive consequences (but see Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014, for a handwriting advantage in learning). In this study, we investigated how readers’ handwriting/k...

This article presents the ENglish Reading Online (ENRO) project that offers data on English reading and listening comprehension from 7,338 university-level advanced learners and native speakers of English representing 19 countries. The database also includes estimates of reading rate and seven component skills of English, including vocabulary, spel...

Event roles are an indispensable part of event construal because they encode information about “who did what to whom.” For example, in the sentence “he kicked the ball,” “he” is an agent that initiates the action “kicking” to a patient “ball” which receives the action. The previous studies demonstrated that in the linguistic encodings of event role...

The effects of creativity and difficulty on analogical reasoning in L1 and L2 This study investigates first- (L1) and second-language (L2) analogical reasoning processing. When people learn something new, retrieving prior knowledge and transferring it to a new domain is a fundamental cognitive process (Gentner & Maravilla, 2018). Wakebe et al. (201...

This study investigated metaphor processing in a second language (L2) by considering both analogy and categorization. Wolff and Gentner (2011) found that forward metaphors (e.g., “Some babies are angels”) were judged as to be more comprehensible than reversed metaphors (e.g., “Some angels are babies”) only when the sentences were presented for a lo...

The current study examined factors influencing acceptance of transgender athletes in sport events. Quantitative data were gathered from 373 members of university sport teams in the Tokai area of Japan. Using linear mixed-effects regression modeling, we investigated contributions of two types of predictors. One is the context in which trans athletes...

This research aims to discover metaphor understanding in a second language. According to Littlemore, Chen, Koester, and Barnden (2011), metaphors in a second language is difficult to understand even for learners of upper level. The difficulty does not come from lexical meaning itself, but the metaphorical usage of the words. Thus, even if “father”...

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions Bilingual lexical processing is non-selective, which allows for activation of the non-target language, even when reading in a different script. However, while the influence of cross-script L1 lexical knowledge has been demonstrated in isolated word reading, it is unknown whether it survives in more nat...

This research aims to construct a psycholinguistic model of metaphor processing in a second language by considering both analogy and categorization. Wolff and Gentner (2011), testing native speakers withboth forward and reversed metaphors, found that metaphor processing in a first language requires bothanalogical alignment of nouns and categorizati...

The original publication of the article contained an error. In Figure 3, the y-axis label for Panel (e) should be “Saccade Velocity (degrees/sec)”; it is not “Second Fixation Duration (ms).” Below is the corrected version of Fig. 3. (Figure presented.).

Recent findings have re-examined the linguistic influence on cognition and perception, while identifying evidence that supports the Whorfian hypothesis. We examine how English and Japanese speakers perceive similarity of pairs of objects, by using two sets of stimuli: one in which two distinct linguistic categories apply to respective object images...

By combining lexical recognition paradigms and written production it is possible to efficiently investigate the roles of perception, production, and participant properties in lexical processing. We report on an approach to experimentation that generates a rich set of dependent variables associated with naming stimuli aloud and with writing. Crucial...

Extending previous studies on sub-lexical character constituent activation in Japanese and Chinese, the present regression study investigates whether recognition of two-character words in Japanese involves activation of semantic radicals and whether the semantic radicals’ contribution is orthographic or semantic in nature. A mixed-effects model com...

This study examines how the cross-linguistic similarity of translation equivalents affects bilingual word recognition. Performing one of three tasks, Dutch–English bilinguals processed cognates with varying degrees of form overlap between their English and Dutch counterparts (e.g., lamp–lamp vs. flood-vloed vs. song-lied). In lexical decision, reac...

Given that word translation equivalents in different languages can give rise to different word structure s which can cast different shades of meaning, this study investigates whether such cross-linguistic differences influence how speakers of different languages compare two objects. Picture comparison tasks revealed that speakers of Japanese and En...