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88 READING RESEARCH QUARTERLY * Number 1, 1978-1979 XIV/I
Les Mots complets kanji sont-ils plus faciles a apprendre que les
syllabes kana?
ONA EXAMINE LADIFFICULTE relative A apprendre les mots japon-
nais kanji et les syllables kana. Les sujets de l'experience 6taient 42
enfants ag6s de 3 et 4 ans. On a donn6 a chacun d'entre eux 4 616-
ments A apprendre, 2 kanji et 2 symboles linguistiques individuels
kana. Les l66ments de l'exp6rience comprenaient 84 kanji divers et
84 symboles kana diff6rents. On a remarqu6 que les kanji 6taient
plus faciles &apprendre, bien qu'ils soient graphiquement plus com-
pliqu6s. 37% des kanji ont 6t6 appris en 3 6preuves; 15% ont 6t6
apprise des la lere 6preuve. La plus grande partie des kana n'a pas 6t6
apprise. Le sens d'un symbole est interpr6t6comme 6tant beaucoup
plus important quand on apprend des symboles d'6critureque n'est
la complexit6 visuelle du symbole.
* We are greatly indebted to Naoki Oka of the Department of Psychology, Hiroshima University,
for the valuable assistance that he provided in the planning, execution, and analysis of this experi-
ment. We are further indebted to Yoko Nakano, Seiko Hirakawa, and Setsuko Kanemoto for
their fine efforts on our behalf.
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Learningkanjiand kana STEINBERG and YAMADA 89
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90 QUARTERLY*
READING RESEARCH Number 1, 1978-1979 XIV/I
Method
Subjects
The subjects were 42 children who attend nursery school in a
middle income neighborhood in Hiroshima City.' There were 14 girls
1. We would like to express our thanks to Prof. Seisoh Sukemune and Prof. Shinji Ishii of
Hiroshima University and the following nursery school principals in Hiroshima City for their
cooperation and assistance: Ms. Yuriko Kawamoto of Senda Nursery School and Mr. Ryuzo
Matsuo of Mimyo Nursery School and Kindergarten.
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Learning kanji and kana STEINBERG and YAMADA 91
and 28 boys. Seventeen of the children were 3 years old, and 25 were 4
years old. The children were randomly selected from a number of classes.
Materials
The subjects were each presented 2 kanji and 2 kana items
drawn from 42 kanji nouns, 21 kanji verbs, 21 kanji adjectives, 42
individual hiragana symbols, and 42 individual katakana symbols. The
84 kanji words were selected at random from the first 4 grades of kanji
that is prescribed for teaching by the Japan Ministry of Education.2 Most
of these words are known in speech by nursery school children. The
grading of this vocabulary is made by the Ministry generally not on the
basis of reading difficulty but of writing difficulty. Simpler kanji (in
terms of number of strokes) are generally taught sooner. In this
experiment, a kanji item was not included in the selection if it was felt that
the word was not in the speech-understandingvocabulary of the subjects.
A summary of the characteristics of the kanji words with respect to
grammatical class and grade level is shown in Table 1. The particular
kanji words are listed in Table 4 of the Results section.
Table1 Frequencyof kanjitest items by gradeand grammaticalclass
Grade Noun Verb Adjective Total
1 12 1 6 19
2 13 3 5 21
3 11 8 6 25
4 6 9 4 19
Total 42 21 21 84
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92 READING RESEARCH QUARTERLY * Number 1, 1978-1979 XIV/ 1I
Procedure
Each of the subjects was pretested for knowledge of kana
symbols. (Their knowledge of kanji would be negligible since kanji are
not taught to children by their parents or teachers until they are at least in
Grade 1 of elementary school.) The children were shown individual
hiragana and katakana symbols on cards and were asked to verbally
identify them. Children who could identify more than 1 such symbol were
not kept as subjects.
The subjects were each given 1 identification trial and 10
experimental trials on their 4 items, in a paired-associate learning
paradigm. That is, 11 trials were given for the same 4 items. This
paradigm is similar to the one used by teachers in Japan where kanji and
kana are generally taught as isolated items which children are requiredto
memorize. The kana are taught in order. There is a specific orderjust as
there is an order to the ABC's.
In the identification trial, each item was shown to the subject
and verbally identified by the experimenter. The subject was asked to
repeat what the experimenter said. In each experimental trial, the
subjects were shown the item and given about 4 seconds in which to make
a verbal response. If the response was a correct one, the subject was
praised. If the response was incorrect, or if none was made, the subject
was told the correct response and asked to repeat it.
Each subject was tested individually. He or she was given
instructions regarding the task and was further told that on finishing the
task, he or she would be given a reward. The subject was then shown a
number of decorated pencils and was told that one of these would be the
reward. Every subject was given one as a reward regardless of how he or
she performed. During the experiment, the experimenters were friendly,
warm, and encouraging.
Presentation order. So as to control for any possible serial
order bias in the presentation of items, the trials for each subject were
systematically varied regarding the order of type of item (noun, verb, or
adjective kanji, hiragana, and katakana). With regard to this control, a
total of 4 different orders of items were presented to each subject on the
10 experimental trials. A subject's orders were: ABCD, BCDA, CDAB,
and DABC, where A = a noun kanji, B = a verb or adjective kanji, C = a
hiragana symbol, and D = a katakana symbol. Trials 1, 5, and 9 were
given in the same order; and each of the other 3 orders were used in either
Trials 2, 6, and 10;Trials 3 and 7; or Trials 4 and 8. The identification trial
was arbitrarily assigned the same order used on Trials 4 and 8.
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Learning kanji and kana STEINBERG and YAMADA 93
Results
The mean, median, and standard deviation for the kanji
nouns, kanji verbs, the kanji adjectives, the hiragana, and the katakana
are shown in Table 2. Also shown are means derived from combinations
of these 4 basic categories of scores: kanji predicates (verbs plus
adjectives), all kanji (nouns plus verbs plus adjectives), and all kana
(hiragana plus katakana). It is worth noting here that kanji predicates are
graphically more complex in general than are kanji nouns because verbs
and adjectives have hiragana added to them. It might be expected,
therefore, that the kanji predicates would be more difficult to learn
because of this added complexity.
The table shows that the kanji means and medians are all
higher than the kana means, and that the means and medians for the
kanji nouns are higher than that for kanji verbs, adjectives, and their
combination. A 1-way analysis of variance, repeated measures (Winer,
1971, p. 268), was run on the 4 means representing the different types of
3. We are grateful to Tomoko Muramoto, Junko Ota, Sanoe Sakura, and Kumiko Tatsuno for
their help in the testing of subjects.
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94 QUARTERLY *
READINGRESEARCH Number 1, 1978-1979 XIV/I
items: kanji nouns (5.79), kanji predicates (4.95), hiragana (2.95), and
katakana (2.21). The kanji verbs and adjectives were combined for this
analysis because the difference in score between them is so slight and
because they have similar orthographic and linguistic characteristics as
compared to nouns.) There is a significant main effect for the type of
writing symbol, F - 10.91; df = 3, 123;p <.01.
All possible pairings of these 4 means were tested for
significance by use of the Newman-Keuls method (Winer, 1971, p. 270).
The results show that there is a significant difference between means at
the .05 or .01 level for all cases except kanji nouns and predicates, and,
between hiragana and katakana. The details of the analysis are shown in
Table 3.
Table3 Newman-Keulstest resultson differencesbetweenmeans for the 2
kana and the kanjinouns and predicates
Kata- Hira- Kanji Kanji
kana gana Pred. Noun
2.21 2.95 4.95 5.79
Katakana 2.21 - - -- 0.74 2.74** 3.58**
Hiragana 2.95 ---- 2.00** 2.84**
Kanji predicate 4.95 ---- 0.84
Kanji noun 5.79
<
**p .01, where the critical formeansseparatedby2 steps= 1.87,by3 steps= 2.12,andby4 steps= 2.27.
difference
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Learning kanji and kana STEINBERG and YAMADA 95
VERBS
Score f Grade 1 Grade 2 Grade 3 Grade 4
10 5 umareru (be born) kau (buy) noboru (climb)
taberu (eat)
okiru (wake up)
9 3 miru (see) tobu (fly)
iku (go)
8 1 ochiru (fall)
7 1 hataraku (work)
6 1 naku (cry)
5 1 yaku (burn)
4 0
3 0
2 1 hirou (pick up)
1 2 matsu (wait)
susumu (advance)
0 6 tsukuru (make) tomaru (stop) musubu (tie)
narau (learn)
kesu (put out)
utsu (hit)
Total 21 1 3 8 9
ADJECTIVES
Score f Grade 1 Grade 2 Grade 3 Grade 4
10 1 shiroi (white)
9 4 chiisai (small) atsui (hot) mijikai (short)
toi (far)
8 1 okii (big)
7 2 takai (high) hiroi (wide)
6 1 samui (cold)
5 2 tsuyoi (strong) karui (light)
4 2 kuroi (black)
akarui (bright)
3 1 kanashii (sad)
2 2 furui (old) tanoshii (happy)
1 2 tadashii (correct)
akai (red)
0 3 aoi (blue) hayai (fast) yoi (good)
Total 21 6 5 6 4
to an oversight, 2 pairs of homophones were included in the stimulus materials:hana (flower) and hana (nose), kawa
"aDue
(river) and kawa (skin). For convenience, the items are scored as if the subjects were aware of the intended meaning.
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96 RESEARCH
READING * Number 1, 1978-1979
QUARTERLY XIV/I
between the score obtained for a hiragana item and the score obtained on
the corresponding katakana item: that is, the 2 kana forms for the same
speech syllable were correlated. Thus, for example, the score of 0 for
hiragana ka was correlated with the score of 5 for katakana ka.4 The
Pearson r of -.015 is not significant.
A correlation was run on the 42 kanji nouns in order to
determine whether there was a relationship between the number of
strokes in a kanji noun and its obtained score. The resulting r of +.261 is
not significant.
In order to determine whether there was a relationship
between the obtained learning score for kanji and kana items and the
meaningfulness (M) of those items, a crude additional mini-experiment
was run.5 M scores (estimates of meaningfulness) were collected from 3-
and 4-year-old nursery school children who were comparable to the
4. For the remainder of the text of this report and in all the tables, we will often use the romanized
spelling of Japanese syllables and morphemes to represent the Japanese kana and kanji writing. The
reader should keep in mind, however, that the subjects were presented the Japanese kana and kanji
writing and not the romanization.
5. We are indebted to Michiko Matsuda Tashiro and Michie Yamura Harada for the testing of
these subjects.
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Learning kanji and kana STEINBERG and YAMADA 97
Discussion
Relative ease of kanji learning
The results clearly show that young children learn kanji words
more quickly than they do individual kana symbols. Such is the case even
when kanji verbs and adjectives are involved. This is somewhat
surprising when one considers that Japanese verbs and adjectives are
written with 2 types of symbols, kanji plus hiragana. Such items are thus
more complex and lengthy than any individual kana.
Since kanji forms are associated with speech words that are
meaningful for children and the kana forms are associated mainly with
meaningless speech syllables, this study indicates that it is the variable of
meaningfulness that is producing the higher scores for kanji recognition.
Meaningfulness was of such great importance that its effects over-
powered that of visual perceptual complexity. The view of a theorist,
such as Smith (1973, 1977), who stresses the importance of meaningful-
ness in reading thus finds support from these results. Also indicative of
the potency of meaningfulness in the learning of written forms is the fact
that the children learned kanji items irrespective of their differing visual
complexity-as measured by number of strokes or grade level. For
example, kanji items composed of as many as 16 strokes, hashi (bridge)
and kusuri (medicine), were learned on the first trial. These findings are
in accord with the results of Fukuzawa (1976) who found that meaning
and not perceptual complexity mainly determined the acquisition rate of
kanji for elementary and middle school children.
Furthermore, the significant correlation of +.345 between
learning score and the measure of meaningfulness (M) indicates the
relevance of the role of meaning in learning, with higher learning scores
occurring with higher meaningfulness scores. Such a correlation
undoubtedly would be much higher had a better estimate of
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98 READING
RESEARCH * Number 1, 1978-1979
QUARTERLY XIV/I
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Learning kanji and kana STEINBERG and YAMADA 99
References
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