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Cognitive predictors of literacy acquisition in syllabic Hiragana and morphographic Kanji

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Abstract

We examined the role of different cognitive skills in word reading (accuracy and fluency) and spelling accuracy in syllabic Hiragana and morphographic Kanji. Japanese Hiragana and Kanji are strikingly contrastive orthographies: Hiragana has consistent character-sound correspondences with a limited symbol set, whereas Kanji has inconsistent character-sound correspondences with a large symbol set. One hundred sixty-nine Japanese children were assessed at the beginning of grade 1 on reading accuracy and fluency, spelling, phonological awareness, phonological memory, rapid automatized naming (RAN), orthographic knowledge, and morphological awareness, and on reading and spelling at the middle of grade 1. The results showed remarkable differences in the cognitive predictors of early reading accuracy and spelling development in Hiragana and Kanji, and somewhat lesser differences in the predictors of fluency development. Phonological awareness was a unique predictor of Hiragana reading accuracy and spelling, but its impact was relatively weak and transient. This finding is in line with those reported in consistent orthographies with contained symbol sets such as Finnish and Greek. In contrast, RAN and morphological awareness were more important predictors of Kanji than of Hiragana, and the patterns of relationships for Kanji were similar to those found in inconsistent orthographies with extensive symbol sets such as Chinese. The findings suggested that Japanese children learning two contrastive orthographic systems develop partially separate cognitive bases rather than a single basis for literacy acquisition.

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Notes

  1. We call syllabic Hiragana “characters” rather than “letters”, because Japanese language has many single syllable words (e.g., /ki/‘tree’, /te/‘hand’) and a single Hiragana can represent a word by itself.

  2. We call Kanji “morphography” rather than “morphosyllabary”, because a Kanji character can represent not only a syllable but also multi-syllable words (see also Iwata, 1984; Smith, 1996).

  3. Although the authors used this as a measure of phonological awareness, it is traditionally used to measure working memory.

  4. In Kakihana et al.’s study, Hiragana reading fluency was only analyzed in the subsample of children who made no errors in the sentence reading fluency task.

  5. Preliminary analysis showed that there was a ceiling effect with the syllable blocks (28 children [17%] had the maximum score) and a floor effect with the phoneme blocks (131 children [78%] could not correctly answer any items). These numbers indicate that separating syllable items from phoneme items would not allow to examine whether the effect is from syllable or phoneme awareness. Additionally, we confirmed that the children who were at ceiling in the syllable blocks also performed significantly better in the phoneme blocks (M = 2.4, SD 3.2) than those who were not at ceiling in the syllable blocks (M = 0.4, SD 1.4; Brunner–Munzel test, p < .001). This suggests that syllable deletion and phoneme deletion can be placed on a continuum of difficulty. Because of these reasons, we decided to use the Elision task that included both syllable elision and phoneme elision as a single measure of phonological awareness.

  6. Although these reading accuracy measures in Hiragana and Kanji can also be called as Hiragana decoding and Kanji word recognition, respectively, we call both tests as measures of reading accuracy for the consistency of our description.

  7. We did this by using 41 words twice rather than using other words because those 59 Kanji characters were taken from grade 1 textbooks as all had been introduced by the time of testing and other Kanji characters had not been taught to children yet.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant No. 26780523 for Tomohiro Inoue. The authors are grateful to the children, parents, teachers, and school personnel who made this study possible. We further thank the following people for their help: Takako Oshiro, Hirofumi Imanaka, Hiroyuki Kitamura, Keiko Shindo, Katsutoshi Sato, Saori Beppu, Miyuki Nagaoka, and Haruka Watanabe.

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  1. Developmental Child Psychology Department, Seigakuin University, 1-1 Tosaki, Ageo, Saitama, 362-8585, Japan

    Tomohiro Inoue

  2. Department of Educational Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

    George K. Georgiou & Rauno Parrila

  3. Department of Early Childhood Education and Nurture, Tokiwa Junior College, Mito, Japan

    Naoko Muroya

  4. Department of Early Childhood Education, Iwaki Junior College, Iwaki, Japan

    Hisao Maekawa

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Inoue, T., Georgiou, G.K., Muroya, N. et al. Cognitive predictors of literacy acquisition in syllabic Hiragana and morphographic Kanji. Read Writ 30, 1335–1360 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-017-9726-4

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