Frontier Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences
Tohoku University

Kanji are the adopted Chinese characters used in the Japanese language. Despite a long history of movements to abolish the use of kanji, they account for 30 percent of Japanese articles. However, nowadays, more and more people prefer to use a computer rather than write by hand. In particular, the number of Japanese people who cannot write kanji is increasing. Procedural memory cannot persist without physical activity. Can Japanese people maintain the same level of linguistic abilities as they age? To answer this question, it is necessary to unravel which cognitive mechanisms are involved in how people understand and produce Japanese kanji.

I have been studying bilingual-lexical processing in the field of psycholinguistics, especially the mechanism of Japanese two-kanji compound words by Chinese-Japanese bilinguals. My current research aims to clarify the social cohort effect along with the effect of physiological aging changes on the recognition and production of Japanese kanji while deepening knowledge in a wide range of fields such as linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, sociology, and gerontology. This research is expected to illuminate how best to maintain the language abilities of native Japanese speakers and to improve the knowledge of Japanese kanji for foreign Japanese-language learners.