Abstract
The aim of this study was to identify the cognitive structures of kanji abilities in the Japanese general population and to examine age and cohort effects on them. From a large database of the most popular kanji exam in Japan, we analyzed high school graduation level data of 33,659 people in 2006 and 16,971 people in 2016. Confirmatory factor analyses validated the three-dimensional model of kanji abilities, including factors of reading, writing and semantic comprehension. Furthermore, the age effect on writing, and correlations between writing and semantic dimensions, were different between 2006 and 2016, suggesting reduced writing ability and stagnation in integrated mastery of kanji orthography and semantics in current-day Japanese adults. These findings provide the first evidence of the multidimensional nature of Japanese kanji abilities, and age/cohort differences in that dimensional structure. The importance of the habit of handwriting for literacy acquisition is discussed.
Highlights
Writing systems can be broadly divided into phonographic and logographic scripts
Whereas reading/writing by the non-lexical route relies on grapheme-to-phoneme or phoneme-to-grapheme conversion based on letter-sound correspondence, word-level reading/writing by the lexical route employs word-specific phonological and orthographic memory representations, and the corresponding conceptual representations in the semantic system[6]
Opinion polls taken by the Agency for Cultural Affairs in Japan reported that public interest in learning the Japanese language, which includes spoken and written language, has not generally changed in recent decades[19], increased attention to learning English or internationalization may have resulted in a decrease in the time and effort dedicated to learning Japanese kanji
Summary
Writing systems can be broadly divided into phonographic and logographic scripts. In the former, a letter is mapped onto a sound unit, as in English. Opinion polls taken by the Agency for Cultural Affairs in Japan reported that public interest in learning the Japanese language, which includes spoken and written language, has not generally changed in recent decades[19], increased attention to learning English or internationalization may have resulted in a decrease in the time and effort dedicated to learning Japanese kanji These environmental changes possibly affect age-dependent acquisition of kanji abilities in Japanese, the dimension related to writing accuracy or orthographic lexicon in adults, as well as integrated mastery of multidimensional kanji skills. We hypothesized that (1) the three-factor model of Japanese kanji abilities, including factors of reading accuracy (kanji phonology), writing accuracy (kanji orthography), and semantic comprehension (kanji semantics), fits better than two- or single-factor models, (2) age of examinees affects kanji abilities factor-and in terms of the relationships among the factors, and (3) the pattern of age effects shown in 2006 data differs from that of 2016
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