Effects of instruction of imaging Kanji-shape on listening comprehension of Japanese texts

Japanese has three types of letters : Kanji (Chinese character), Kana, and Katakana. When learners listen to Japanese texts and try to memorize the contents, they can use those orthographic features of Japanese in some manner. An experiment was carried out to examine the effects of instruction of imaging Kanji-shape on free recall and cued recall of texts in Japanese. Japanese native speakers were required to listen silently an expository text either in short-length condition or in long-length. The subjects were also asked to listen the text either with the instruction of retrieving Kanji simultaneously, which was auditory presented in the text, or not. Main results were that under the condition of retrieval instruction of Kanji, memory performances of the short-length text were better than those of long-length text both for literal aspect and for semantic aspect. It was suggested that imaging Kanji-shapes by listening comprehension of Japanese texts led to encoding orthographic information on Kanji-words and to re-encoding semantic information. These results were further discussed based on working memory with limited processing resources