Abstract
Of the 46 characters in the Japanese kana syllabary, twenty can appear with or without 2 marks (like quotation marks) to the right of the upper right corner of the character. When the 2 marks are there, the consonant of the consonant-vowel syllable is pronounced as a voiced consonant (e. g.,/ta/becomes/da/). The present research investigated whether young Japanese children utilize this voicing relation when learning to read characters with voiced consonants (“daku-on” characters). Study 1 showed that about half of 4- to 5-year-old beginning readers of such characters could supply the voiced version of the character (e. g.,/da/) to the character with the double marks when given the sound of the character (e. g.,/ta/) together with a parallel example (e. g.,/ka/becomes/ga/). In an analogy task in Study 2, non-standard (made-up) kana-like characters were presented with a consonant-vowel syllable (e. g.,/pa/), and 4-year-old nursery school children were asked to predict the sound that the character would have when the character was followed with double marks. About 90% of intermediate readers of voiced characters could infer the sound of the target characters. Study 3, which analyzed error rates that 4-to 5-year old nursery school children made when providing the sound of kana characters, found that irregular /bV/characters (i. e.,/hV/s become /bV/s) were more difficult for them. These results suggest that the children had learned to read voice consonants by analogy, rather than by rote.
