This is the second volume of the three-volume series on East Asian psycholinguistics that includes Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, the languages that have received significant research interest in psycholinguistics outside the Indo-European language family. During the past two to three decades, a substantial body of knowledge has accumulated in the study of the cognitive processes and brain mechanisms underlying language use, language acquisition, and language disorders in the Japanese language.

Most of the work in Japanese psycholinguistics has been influenced by the study of English. However, in recent years, researchers interested in Japanese have employed a variety of theoretical and experimental paradigms to examine various issues in order to understand the human cognitive system. Japanese has served well as a crucial test case for general psycholinguistic theories and models. Both universal and specific aspects of the language have been revealed, which has made significant contributions to this fast-developing field. Although space does not allow us to exhaustively cover the topics and theories concerning Japanese psycholinguistics, we believe that we were successful in including most representative topics in the subfields of Japanese psycholinguistics, and are very pleased to be able to present the state-of-the-art theories and findings written by as many experts as can be included in this volume. As a matter of convenience, the articles in this volume are grouped into two sections: “Language acquisition” and “Language processing.” Please note that all articles are naturally interrelated beyond these groupings.