A paper on L2 shiritori at the Japanese Cognitive Science Society

Rule-ambiguity and distributional play in asynchronous L2 shiritori, with Jumpei Nishikawa (Okayama Prefectural University) and Junya Morita (Shizuoka University), was presented in the International Session of the Japanese Cognitive Science Society’s annual meeting.

Shiritori chains words so that each begins with the final mora of the previous one — and a word ending in ん loses. That makes it a naturally occurring experiment in constrained lexical retrieval. Analyzing 9,891 moves from 568 second-language Japanese learners on a public forum, we find the constraint is handled at three dissociable levels: proficiency predicts what words players retrieve, but strategic trap-avoidance is learned individually from experience and is unrelated to proficiency — while vocabulary sophistication tracks the community rather than personal history.

The collaboration began with a visit to Shizuoka University in January.