The use of picture and sound mnemonics is a common method in teaching katakana as a second or foreign language. However, there is no published study that investigated the effectiveness of such mnemonics on learning katakana. Do they have immediate effects on learning, as they do in hiragana (Matsunaga, 2003)? Would there be any performance difference between those who have prior experience in learning non- Roman scripts in their first language (L1) (non-Roman group) and those who do not (Roman group), as there is in hiragana (Matsunaga, 2003)?
This paper presents a study which attempted to answer these questions. In this study, 62 beginning learners of Japanese at an American university participated in four computer-generated tutorial sessions of katakana. All of the participants had learned hiragana in the previous quarter. In each of the experimental sessions, one of four sets of ten katakana was introduced in one of four teaching methods: picture and sound mnemonics, picture mnemonics, sound mnemonics, and flash cards. Each session consisted of a learning phase, a review phase, and a self-test phase. Each session was followed immediately by an oral interview, and by recall tests two to five days later.
In contrast to the results of Matsunaga's (2003) study, the present results indicated that: (a) overall the conventional mnemonics had neither immediate nor lasting effects on recalls of katakana, given that the learners had mastered hiragana and developed other effective learning strategies; (b) while strategies other than the use of the provided mnemonics had long-term effects for the non-Roman group, they did not for the Roman group in some cases. These results are discussed in relation to the transfer of L1 script recognition strategies (e.g., Chikamatsu, 1996). In addition, an observation is made as to why the conventional method was not effective, and future studies are suggested.