Neurolinguistic Aspects of the Japanese Writing System

235 Pages·1985·2.942 MB·English

Neurolinguistic Aspects
of the
Japanese Writing System
Michel Paradis
Department of Linguistics
McGill University
Montreal, Canada
Hiroko Hagiwara
Department of Linguistics Department of English
McGill University and Kinjo Gakuin University
Montreal, Canada Nagoya, Japan
Nancy Hildebrandt
Department of Linguistics
McGill University
Montreal, Canada
Foreword by JOHN C. MARSHALL
1985
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Paradis, Michel.
Neurolinguistic aspects of the Japanese writing
system.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Dyslexia--Japan. 2. Neurolinguistics. 3. Language
disorders—Japan. 4. Japanese language—Writing.
5. Japanese language—Orthography and spelling.
6. Japanese language—Syntax. I. Hagiwara, Hiroko.
II. Hildebrandt, Nancy. III. Title.
RC394.W6P37 1985 616.85'53Ό089956 84-16860
ISBN 0-12-544965-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
85 86 87 88 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Foreword
Spoken languages, qua formal objects, are not restricted to a single
phenotypic type. Rather, their grammars exhibit considerable structural
variation that can be characterized, in traditional terms, as primarily
isolating, agglutinating, or inflecting. Similarly, when languages are ex-
pressed in more or less permanent visual form (in cuneiform, or Cyrillic
script, for example), their orthographies differ widely in the level or levels
of linguistic form that are represented explicitly and (more or less)
systematically.
Just as current syntactic theory attempts to specify parametric variation
within the constraints of Universal Grammar, so a theory of orthography
should characterize both the universal constraints and allowable variants
that define the script-types accessible to human psychobiology. Just as the
child can acquire any natural language (upon adequate exposure), so can
he or she learn to use a variety of culturally evolved writing systems.
Despite this fact, it is often argued that the acquisition of literacy is, in
some sense, an "unnatural" skill. Scholars are prone to remind us that
the history of "true" writing systems can only be traced back to about
3500 B.C.E. (although Schmandt-Besserat, 1980, has argued cogently for the
existence of precursors dated some 5000 years earlier). The history of mass
literacy (in the Western world) is considerably briefer, and over consider-
able areas of the globe literacy is even now the prerogative of a small,
privileged class; even in societies where the educational system aims to
achieve 100% literacy, a small but distressing minority of children experi-
ence great difficulty in learning to read and never achieve the fluent
command of visual language skills that are necessary to participate fully in
a technological society.
vii
viii Foreword
Small wonder, then, that linguists should so often have regarded visual
language as the disadvantaged relative of spoken language, and that
educators should periodically contemplate orthographic reform as a means
of fitting the medium to the message. Without wishing to downplay the
very real problems involved in achieving the goal of global literacy, there
is a more positive and, to my mind, more interesting way of looking at
the issue. Given adequate exposure, sufficient motivation, and decent
teaching, the vast majority of children are perfectly capable of acquiring
good reading and writing skills. Furthermore, they are capable of this feat
when exposed to the orthographies of French or English, Arabic or
Hebrew, Korean or Navajo, or any of the other script-types that can be
found in five continents. Some children achieve an understanding of
written language before formal schooling, and many have mastered the
basic skills of literacy after only a year or two of instruction. No account of
the psychobiology of written language can afford to ignore such basic facts.
Written language cannot be dangerously close to the epistemological
boundary of what the human brain is incapable of comprehending and
manipulating.
Much of what we know about the structural organization of reading and
writing skills and their material substrate in the brain has come from
detailed studies of the fractionation and partial loss of written-language
competence in previously literate adults who have sustained damage to the
central nervous system (Geschwind, 1962). More recently, the paradigm of
information-processing psychology has allowed for a considerable integra-
tion of studies of normal and impaired reading whereby pathological data
are interpreted as the selective loss of particular modular components and
mechanisms that underlie fluent, mature skill (Coltheart, 1981; Newcombe
& Marshall, 1981; Patterson, 1981). Introduction of the technique of split
visual-field presentation, whereby a stimulus can be projected initially to
either the left or the right half-brain (Franz & Davis, 1933) has likewise
served to revive theoretical interest in differential hemispheric specializa-
tion for the linguistic and visuospatial aspects of written language (Zaidel,
1983).
For obvious reasons, most of this work has been conducted with people
whose native orthographies are the alphabetic scripts of West Europe and
North America: English, French, Italian, and German, in particular.
Whilst there are significant differences in the ways in which these lan-
guages are mapped into written form the structural characteristics of their
orthographies fall within a very narrow band of the typological variants of
writing systems. Outside of Europe and North America, only one other
culture—that of Japan—has so far supported an extensive research
tradition in which the patterns of selective loss and preservation of
Foreword ix
visual-language skills consequent upon brain damage have been evaluated
in any detail. Much of the documentation of these deficits, written for the
most part in Japanese, has, of course, been unavailable to Western
students of the acquired dyslexias and dysgraphias. Much of the informa-
tion that has percolated into Western neurolinguistics has been grossly
oversimplified or downright misleading, as Westerners have typically
failed to appreciate the full complexity of the Japanese writing system(s).
Most of us know that Japanese is a mixed system, syllabic (kana) and
"ideographic" (kanji), but we have all too often glossed over the richness
of structural information that hides behind these seemingly innocent
descriptions.
The development of a truly universal neurolinguistics of written lan-
guage will for long be in debt to Michel Paradis, Hiroko Hagiwara, and
Nancy Hildebrandt. For the first time in English, they have provided us
with a full and lucid analysis of the fine grain of the Japanese writing
system, and have summarized all the clinical reports of dyslexic fractiona-
tion in Japanese back to the turn of the century. This major monograph,
linguistically informed, clinically astute, and organized with an eye to
theory construction within an information-processing framework, is the
firm foundation on which future work will build. It will, one hopes, serve as
a model for further studies in which a similarly detailed analysis is under-
taken of the neurolinguistic structure of other non-Western orthographies.
One particularly valuable aspect of Paradis, Hagiwara, and Hilde-
brandt's work is that they have brought together in one monograph clinical
studies of acquired dyslexia and experimental investigations of hemi-
spheric specialization for written language in normal subjects. Our jour-
nals bear horrendous witness to how easy it is to run ill-thought and badly
controlled experiments on laterality effects. The temptation to display a
motley collection of kana and kanji in the two visual fields and to interpret
the results in terms of some overreaching, oversharp dichotomy has often
proved overwhelming. Western (and, to some extent, even Japanese)
scholars have succumbed to conclusions that are simply unfounded be-
cause the stimulus materials have been confounded. Paradis, Hagiwara,
and Hildebrandt provide a masterly summary and critique of this literature
that should, at very least, provoke a dramatic increase in the level of
sophistication that future experimentalists may reasonably aspire to.
Modern information-processing accounts of normal reading and pathol-
ogies of reading have a provenance of only a little over a decade; they were
constructed on the basis of a very limited range of data from an even more
limited set of writing systems. Despite the narrowness of this empirical
base, it is most heartening to see that those models do appear to provide a
theoretical framework within which to interpret the pathologies of reading
χ Foreword
and writing seen in the radically different orthographic system of Japanese.
Whilst current models are computationally much underspecified, they do
seem to be a step in the right direction. The systematization of Neuroling-
uistic Aspects of the Japanese Writing System that Paradis, Hagiwara, and
Hildebrandt have achieved brings forcibly to our attention the absolute
necessity of developing these models within the context of a universal
theory of reading and writing. And universal in a linguistic context means,
of course, that language- and culture-specific variation must be accounted
for. There is every reason to hope and expect that the next decade of
neurolinguistic research on writing systems will be even more exciting than
the last, and that our theories will be considerably deepened by insisting
that they be made responsive to data on a fair sample of the phenotypically
distinct script-types that children can and do master "naturally."
John C. Marshall
Oxford, England
REFERENCES
Coltheart, M. (1981). Disorders of reading and their implications for models of normal
reading. Visible Language 15, 245-286.
Franz, S. I., & Davis, E. F. (1933). Simultaneous reading with both cerebral hemispheres.
Studies in cerebral function, IV. Publications of the University of California at Los
Angeles in Education, Philosophy, and Psychology 1, 99-106.
Geschwind, Ν. (1962). The anatomy of acquired disorders of reading. In J. Money (Ed.),
Reading disorders. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Newcombe, F., & Marshall, J. C. (1981). On psycholinguistic classifications of the acquired
dyslexias. Bulletin of the Orton Society 31, 29-4.
Patterson, Κ. I. (1981). Neuropsychological approaches to the study of reading. British
Journal of Psychology 72, 151-174.
Schmandt-Besserat, D. (1980). The envelopes that bear the first writing. Technology
and Culture 21, 357-385.
Zaidel, E. (1983). Disconnection syndrome as a model for laterality effects in the normal
brain. In J. B. Hellige (Ed.), Cerebral hemisphere asymmetry: Method, theory and
applications. New York: Praeger.
Preface
The purpose of this book is to provide English readers with an account
and an analysis of cases of dissociation between kana and kanji script
in reading and/or writing reported in the clinical and experimental litera-
ture since the beginning of the century. It includes reports previously
available only in Japanese (the language of the vast majority of publica-
tions on the subject). To this end a brief description of the Japanese
writing system is provided, particularly of those features relevant to a
meaningful interpretation of the data obtained from clinical and ex-
perimental studies. Indeed, because many of these features have been
ignored in most past investigations—ignored by Japanese investigators for
lack of linguistic sophistication and by Western investigators for lack of
sufficient knowledge of the Japanese writing system—great caution is
advised in the interpretation of results published so far. These results are
presented along with reasons why they are at best ambiguous and at worst
completely uninterpretable. Alternate possible explanations are suggested
and constraints on the choice of stimuli to serve in future experimental or
clinical research are outlined. The use of these differentiated stimuli may
eventually provide grounds for a radical reinterpretation of available data,
with far-reaching consequences for the diagnosis of dyslexia and associated
deficits in Japanese patients.
The study of dyslexia in Japanese, a language that combines two very
different types of graphic symbols in its writing system, may tell us
something about reading strategies in general. As such, it is of interest not
only to the researcher concerned with Japanese dyslexia but to the psy-
chologist, the neurologist, and the linguist. In particular, data in support
of the psychological reality of hypothetical constructs of reading processes
such as box diagrams are of benefit to the psychologist, and the detection
xi
xii Preface
of anatomical correlates of cognitive skills involved in reading is of
relevance to the neurologist. In addition, it is of importance to the linguist
to investigate the relationship between the spoken and the written form of
a language that contains a relatively small number of possible syllables and
a very large number of homophones, and whose writing system integrates a
syllabic system (with very few grapheme-to-syllable correspondence excep-
tions), and an ideographic system (with most characters being multiple
homographs).
Thus, in the present volume each previously published case study of
dyslexia in Japanese is extensively summarized; all cases are tabulated and
thoroughly analyzed in the search for correlations between patterns of
impairments and site of lesion, degree of literacy, associated aphasie or
agraphic deficits, age, sex, and severity of the alexia. This survey of clinical
cases should dispel some prevalent misconceptions about the incidence of
differential impairment of kanji subsequent to right hemisphere damage.
The survey of the Japanese laterality literature should likewise show that
there are no differences with respect to results from English studies, once
methodological variables are taken into account.
All three authors worked together to produce this monograph, each
bringing to the task different skills and a different way of looking at the
Japanese writing system. Hiroko Hagiwara provided the insights of a
native speaker into the facts of Japanese, translated the case reports from
Japanese into English, and analyzed the clinical literature. Her contribu-
tion is based on her M.A. thesis for the Department of Linguistics at
McGill University. Nancy Hildebrandt, a nonnative speaker of Japanese,
was able to study the system from the Outside and analyzed the ex-
perimental literature. Michel Paradis approached the system with no prior
knowledge of Japanese but rather in the manner of a linguist who elicits
information in the field, thereby educing the parameters relevant to
psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic investigation, and interpreting the
identified patterns of data. Although each author was primarily responsi-
ble for writing the initial draft of a given chapter, each was also responsible
for reviewing them all.
We are indebted to many colleagues for constructive comments in
conversations and at meetings over the past 2 years. In particular, we wish
to thank Drs. Derek Besner, Justine Sergent, Atsushi Yamadori, Morihiro
Sugishita, Makoto Iwata, and Molly Mack for providing valuable com-
ments and advice. The contents of this book grew out of more general
research on aphasia in bilinguals funded by the Quebec Ministry of
Education FCAC grant EQ 1660.
Glossary
Ateji In the narrow sense used here, ateji refers to
a multi-character kanji whose component char-
acters are pronounced in accordance with a
standard pronunciation (albeit not by virtue of
a phonemic radical) but whose usual meanings
are irrelevant to the meaning of the word (or at
least are far from transparent). Example: ^
(sarcasm) pronounced [hiniku] is written with
the kanji for "skin" [hi] and the kanji for
"meat" [niku]. Ateji is the reverse of the
semantically compositional jukujikun (q.v.).
See Table 1.12 for more examples.
Choo-on Geminate vowels, some of which have an
irregular representation. See Table 1.2.
Furigana Small kana written above a kanji (in hori-
zontal writing) or to the right of the kanji
(in vertical writing) to specify its unfamiliar
pronunciation.
Gogi Word-meaning. Hence, gogi aphasia: word-
meaning aphasia, a syndrome similar to trans-
cortical sensory aphasia, generally accompa-
nied by impairment of kanji processing.
Grapheme As used in this work, a written symbol such
as a letter, a kana (q.v.) or a kanji (q.v.). In
most current literature on dyslexia, grapheme
is more restrictively taken to mean any letter or
xiii
xiv Glossary
group of letters whose realization is a single
phoneme.
Hiragana Syllabic characters normally used to write
grammatical morphemes such as postpositions,
conjunctions, honorific prefixes, case markers,
derivational suffixes and inflections. See Table
1.1. N.B.: Before 1920 katakana (q.v.) were
used for this purpose.
Homograph A word identical in written form with an-
other word of the same language but different
in sound and meaning. English example: wind,
(1) [wamd] to have a curving course;
(2) [wind] a movement of the air. Japanese
example: tt (1) [see] nature, sex; (2) [/oo]
disposition; (3) [saga] custom.
Homophone A word identical in sound with another word
of the same language but different in meaning
and often in written form. English example:
knead and need. For Japanese examples, see
Table 1.6.
Ideogram A written character symbolizing the idea of a
thing without systematic representation of its
pronunciation. Japanese ideograms (kanji)
represent morphemes of the spoken language.
Jukujikun A multi-character kanji whose pronuncia-
tion is independent of any pronunciation of
each component character. There is no fit
between the pronunciation of the word and
that of any component character. The charac-
ters may or may not be semantically composi-
tional. When they are—that is, when the sum
of the meanings of the component characters
yields the meaning of the whole—the juku-
jikun may be considered the reverse of ateji
(q.v.) since here the pronunciation, not the
meaning, is arbitrary. See Table 1.12, Nos. 3
and 4.
Kana A written character (derived from Chinese
writing but extremely simplified) used to
represent Japanese (short) syllables. Strictly
speaking, a kana represents a mora, or syllable
of short duration. It is not clear whether in