Abstract
Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of pictorial and verbal familiarizations on learning to read kana scripts in children.
The purpose of Experiment I was to examine the effects of the familiarity of words and the presentation of pictures on learning to read the top katakana scripts in the words. The subjects were 80 children whose average age was 5: 5. On the basis of the number of letters they could read and the Picture-Completion scores of WISC-R, they were assigned to the following four groups: high familiarity-picture, high familiarity-no picture, low familiarity-picture, and low familiarityno picture groups. Each subject was taught to read five katakana scripts for five trials by a study-test method. For the katakana scripts in the words with high familiarity the performance in the no-picture groups was better than that in the picture groups. For the katakana scripts in the words with low familiarity there was no significant difference between the picture and the no-picture groups.
The purpose of Experiment II was to examine the effects of pictorial and verbal familiarizations on learning to read Hangul scripts (two-letter words) with low familiarity. The subjects were 72 young children (mean age of 5: 9)and 72 first graders (mean age of 7: 2). The subjects in each age level were assigned to the following four groups: sentence-picture, sentence-no picture, no sentence-picture, and no sentence-no picture groups. Each subject was taught to read five Hangul scripts for seven trials by a study-test method. The main effects of sentence and picture were significant, showing that learning to read Hangul scripts was facilitated by the presentation of sentences and pictures. No performance difference was observed between younger and older children. The findings suggest that the pictorial and the verbal familiarizations have facilitating effects on learning to read words with low familiarity.
