IALP 2025

Phonological awareness and literacy acquisition in Japanese: I. Features of phonological awareness in preschool children

Yasuko Okumura 1,2 Dr. Yosuke Kita 2 Dr. Yuka Shirakawa 2 Nina Morohoshi 2 Dr. Michiko Asano 3
1Teaching Japanese as a Second Language Program, Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hiroshima University, Japan
2Department of Psychology, Faculty of Letters, Keio University, Japan
3Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, The University of Tokyo, Japan

Phonological awareness (PA) refers to the ability to access, identify, and manipulate sounds in oral language and is a major predictor of literacy acquisition in school ages. PA is known to have different structure and developmental trajectory according to linguistic features of oral language. In this respect, Japanese has unique phonology against many western languages because phonemes are not available in isolation, and it consists of syllabic units with equal stress and duration called mora. As a first part of the present study, we aimed to examine features of PA in 1773 Japanese preschool children (878 boys) aged 4 to 6 years old. The children were given two PA tasks for orally presented Japanese words: 1) segmentation to say moras in the words separately in correct order with hand clap, and 2) isolation to say a mora at the designated position (initial, final, or medial) within the words. The same 12 words consists of 2 or 3 moras (6 items each) were presented in both tasks. Analyses based on item response theory showed that segmentation and isolation may reflect different dimensions of PA in Japanese with segmentation being distinctively easier than isolation (p < .0001 for difference in mean difficulty parameter). In addition, while the difficulty of segmentation increased with mora length (2 < 3 moras, p < .0001), that for isolation depended on mora positions (initial < final < medial, p < .0001). These results suggest that segmentation is acquired earlier in PA development for Japanese compared to isolation. Mora segmentation may require rather primitive cognitive operations such as sound counting based on rhythm pattern, while isolation should involve access to and identification of moras in phonological representations. Notably, the present finding contrasts with increased difficulty and late development of segmentation in alphabetic languages (e.g., Vloedgraven & Verhoeven, 2009), which indicates the importance of language-specific understanding of PA and its roles in literacy development.

Vloedgraven, J., & Verhoeven, L. (2009). The nature of phonological awareness throughout the elementary grades: An item response theory perspective. Learning and Individual Differences, 19, 161-169.