Chinatowns, as neighborhoods for overseas ethnic Chinese, have garnered considerable scholarly attention from linguistic landscape (LL) researchers in recent years. These investigations tend to treat old immigrants who have been tied to the neighborhoods for generations as the key text producers of LL, with far too little attention paid to the LL…

The effect of spacing in relation to word segmentation was examined for four groups of non-native Chinese speakers (American, Korean, Japanese, and Thai) who were learning Chinese as second language. Chinese sentences with four types of spacing information were used: unspaced text, word-spaced text, character-spaced text, and nonword-spaced text.…

The current study, which is an interface between Chinese linguistics and Japanese linguistics, will inquire into the sounds of Chinese characters in Japanese from the viewpoint of historical linguistics. After Chapters 2 and 3 prepare the readers, Chapter 4 will review how scholars of Japan have studied Sino-Japanese. So far, Tsukishima (1993) is…

"Reading in Asian Languages" is rich with information about how literacy works in the non-alphabetic writing systems (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) used by hundreds of millions of people and refutes the common Western belief that such systems are hard to learn or to use. The contributors share a comprehensive view of reading as construction…

The paper presents preliminary findings of a project which investigated whether learner background, in terms of instruction mode (i.e., school or intensive first-year course at university) and first language (i.e., character based or non-character based), has an impact on the development of writing skills in Japanese as a second language (JSL).…

The historical development of written Japanese has resulted in an extremely complex system. Modern Japanese is usually written in logosyllabic script consisting of a combination of "kanji," the Chinese characters, and "kana," the Japanese syllables originally formed from them. There are two types of "kana," the…

This article analyzes the self-correction of spelling by learners of intermediate Japanese. Participants in this study consisted of 20 students with "kanji" (Chinese characters) background and 43 without. This study investigates (1) types of spelling errors made; (2) the success rate of corrections made when codes for types of errors…