Japanese orthographic complexity and speech duration in a reading task

The number of letters in a word's orthographic form can affect speech duration. Previous research in this area has been limited to studies of languages with alphabets. The current study expands upon this previous research by investigating effects on speech duration from units of orthographic complexity potentially analogous to letter length in Japanese, a language with a logography. In a modified version of a reading task used in one of the prior studies, native Japanese-speaking participants were audio-recorded reading pairs of homophonous words that varied by: 1) number of pen strokes in a single character; or 2) number of whole characters in their orthographic forms. Two-character words were produced significantly longer than one-character words. No significant effect was found from pen strokes on speech duration. These results are presented as evidence that the orthographic duration effect observed in previous studies is not limited to languages with alphabetic writing systems.