Examining the simple view of reading in a hybrid orthography

Abstract

We examined the developmental relationships between oral language skills (vocabulary, morphological awareness), word reading, and reading comprehension in the hybrid orthography of Japanese, where two contrastive scripts (syllabic Hiragana, morphographic Kanji) are used simultaneously. Participants were 191 Japanese-speaking children followed from Grade 2 to Grade 4. Results from a latent variable model showed that Kanji character recognition, but not Hiragana word reading fluency, predicted reading comprehension after controlling for the effects of nonverbal IQ, phonological awareness, and oral language skills. Moreover, oral language skills predicted reading comprehension both directly and indirectly through Kanji character recognition. These findings support the premises of the Simple View of Reading model in the hybrid orthography of Japanese and suggest that the characteristics of script children learn can moderate the associations between the model’s components.