Heritage Language Learners'Acquisition of Kanji in China : Focusing on Cross-Linguistic Transfer Through Cognate Vocabulary

チュウゴク　ニ　オケル　ケイショウ　ニホンゴ　ガクシュウシャ　ノ　カンジ　シュウトク　ドウコンゴ　ニ　ヨル　ゲンゴカン　テンイ　ニ　チャクモク　シテ

ヤナセ, チエミ

Yanase, Chiemi

Mother Tongue, Heritage Language, and Bilingual Education Research Association

ボゴ　ケイショウゴ　バイリンガル　キョウイク　ケンキュウカイ

継承日本語

漢字習得

言語間転移

同根語

Research Papers

This study aims to examine how young heritage Japaneselanguage learners growing up in China acquire Japanese, focusing on the possible impact of their earlier experience of learning Chinese Hanzi on their Kanji acquisition process, based on Cummins' Interdependent hypothesis. Participants of this study were ten K-1 students studying at public Chinese schools and two students from a Japanese school. Each participant was from Chinese-Japanese intermarried family residing in Beijing. Triangulation was used to examine the learners'Kanji acquisition process; namely, Kanji-reading task, a retrospective interview, and a written questionnaire through which their parents describe the children's language competence and daily linguistic resources. The results indicated that theJapanese and Chinese character cognates effectively contributed to the learners' recognition of Kanji. Then the data sources were analyzed, focusing on how they recognize Kanji, how they read unlearned Kanji, and why they read in the way they do, in order to describe the process of linguistic transfer. They further demonstrated that three factors play a key role in promoting linguistic transfer through cognates for students who are at least ages six and seven: their vocabulary size developed through oral conversation experiences, their acquisition level of Hiragana, and their overall cognitive development.