The acquisition of phoneme awareness in children learning the hiragana syllabary

Abstract

In research on the acquisition of reading, there have been some crossorthographic comparisons between alphabetic scripts and the hiragana syllabic script. One of the theoretical motives for these comparisons is the hypothesis that phonological awareness is related to the size of the phonological unit mapped by the orthography, with phoneme awareness limited to readers with alphabetic literacy. Therefore, it would be expected that young Japanese children who learn the hiragana syllabary (and no alphabetic orthography) would have poor awareness of phonemes, which are internal to syllables. The present research used methods more fully representative of the language and orthography examined. The results indicate a previous underestimation of early phonemic awareness in Japanese children.Keywords Phoneme awareness · Hiragana syllabary · Cross-orthographic research · MethodologyThe published research on learning to read a non-alphabetic orthography draws largely on issues, questions, and methodologies from work on the learning of English. Share (2008) drew attention to these 'Anglocentric' findings that may not

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“…Jones et al ., ; Moll et al ., ; Vaessen & Blomert, ). Interestingly, the acquisition of letter–speech sound associations has been shown to boost the development of phoneme awareness (Castles, Wilson, & Coltheart, ; Dehaene, ; Fletcher‐Flinn, Thompson, Yamada, & Naka, ). This fits with our finding that phoneme awareness was associated with alphanumeric RAN, but not nonalphanumeric RAN.…”