2011 Canon Foundation Research Fellowship for Rinus Verdonschot
Rinus Verdonschot has been awarded a Canon Foundation Research Fellowschip to spend one year (2011-2012) ar Nagoya University, Japan.
The main focus of this research will be on the production and interaction between pronunciations in reading aloud Japanese kanji. Japanese kanji are unique in the sense that over 60% of all kanji are heterophonic homographs (i.e. different possible pronunciations associated with a single character). For instance, the kanji character 上 (meaning “up/upper”) can be pronounced as /ue/, /a/, /nobo/, /uwa/, /kami/ or /jyou/ depending on the combination with specific other characters. Using behavioral and neuro-correlational methods this research aims to establish which pronunciations are active, how selection takes place during production, and how to account for this unique feature in currently established language production models (such as the model developed by Levelt, Roelofs & Meyer, 1999).