The Role of Morphological Awareness in Word Reading Skills in Japanese: A Within-Language Cross-Orthographic Perspective

ABSTRACT

We examined the relationship between morphological awareness and word reading skills in syllabic Hiragana and morphographic Kanji. Participants were 127 Grade 1 Japanese-speaking children who were followed until Grade 2. The results showed that Grade 1 morphological awareness was uniquely and comparably associated with word reading skills in both Hiragana and Kanji in Grade 1 after controlling for nonverbal and verbal cognitive abilities, phonological awareness, and rapid automatized naming. The effect of Grade 1 morphological awareness on Grade 2 Kanji word recognition was slightly stronger (∆R² = .10) than the effect on Grade 2 Hiragana reading fluency (∆R² = .03). The findings suggest that morphological awareness plays an important role in early word reading skills across the two scripts, and with reading skill development it may become more important for mastering morphographic Kanji characters.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 26780523 for Tomohiro Inoue. We thank Dr. John Kirby for his valuable comments on an earlier draft of this article. We 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, Haruka Watanabe, Miho Mitsubayashi, and Yuko Tsuboi.

Notes

¹ Preliminary analysis showed that there was a ceiling effect with the mora blocks (15% had the maximum score) and a floor effect with the phoneme blocks (79% could not correctly answer any items). The children who were at ceiling in the mora blocks performed significantly better in the phoneme blocks (M = 2.4, SD = 3.2) than those who made one or more errors in the mora blocks (M = 0.4, SD = 1.4; Brunner-Munzel test, p < .001), suggesting that mora elision and phoneme elision can be placed on a continuum of difficulty in Japanese children (see also Fletcher-Flinn, Thompson, Yamada, & Naka, 2011). As a consequence, we decided to use the Elision task as a single measure of phonological awareness.

² Although there are two possible pronunciations for each of the numbers 4 and 7 in Japanese, the dominant pronunciations for each has historically shifted from one to another (see Shirooka, 2011). Indeed, only a few naming errors occurred in the RAN task (mean number of errors was less than 1), and none of our testers reported that our subjects were using the alternate pronunciation of either 4 or 7.

³ As in other consistent orthographies, reading accuracy in Hiragana was expected to reach ceiling by the middle of Grade 1 (e.g., Sambai et al., 2012). Because of this, we did not include measures of Hiragana reading accuracy.

⁴ In this study, we used existing Kanji reading measures used in a previous study (Inoue et al., 2017) instead of developing new measures. As a result, whereas the words used in the Kanji word recognition test included relatively unfamiliar words for Grade 1 and Grade 2 children, those used in the Kanji word reading fluency test were relatively short and thus had a simple morphemic structure. We discuss this in detail in the Discussion section.

⁵ To examine the possible effects of phonological awareness on the relationship between morphological awareness and word reading skills, partial correlations controlling for phonological awareness were also computed. When the effect of Elision was partialled out, correlations among Word Analogy and word reading measures were slightly reduced but mostly still significant (rs ranged from .11 to .34).