Abstract
The purpose of this study was to explore the relation between phonological awareness of Japanese long vowels and the ability to accurately spell familiar words containing long vowels. The subjects were forty-nine normal children (chronological age or CA, 4:05 to 7:06; vocabulary age or VA, 4:02 to 12:00) and thirty-one developmentally handicapped children (CA, 7:03 to 15:01; VA, 2:01 to 12:00). The results of the study were as follows. For normal children, phonological awareness of long vowels increased with their age. There was, however, no statistically significant difference between age groups regarding correct responses when writing the words. Subjects up to the first grade did seem to realize, however, that there should be someway of indicating the difference between long and short vowels but could not make the correct response. For the developmentally handicapped children, phonological awareness did not increase with increases in their VA.
