Metaphonological abilities of Japanese children

Abstract

Linguists generally conceive of speech as a sequence of elementary soundunits or “phones”. On the other hand, cognitive psychologists have established the existence of a close link between segmental awareness (SA) and alphabetic literacy: the best speech segmenters are also the best readers; conversely, the lack of SA leads to lagging in the acquisition of the written code. Studies carried out with illiterate adults and preliterate children suggest that SA does not arise outside the context of learning to read and write. Furthermore, cross-cultural studies have so far supported the hypothesis that SA is promoted by alphabetic literacy only, and not by logographic or syllabic literacy. The present study is inspired by Mann's (1986) research and aims at studying the phonological (i.e. syllabic and phonemic) analysis abilities of Japanese first-graders who are learning to read in a syllabic writing system. The relatively poor performance of subjects tends to confirm the starting hypothesis that SA is closely linked to alphabetic literacy. Moreover, the subjects apparently resorted to spelling-based strategies to accomplish the tasks presented. This comes to support the general idea that the written characters used to transcribe a language tend to exert a strong influence on the conscious perceptual representation of the phonology of this language.