Effects of Age of Acquisition, Consistency, Familiarity and Imageability on Reading Kanji Words Aloud in Typically Developing Sixth-Graders

Abstract

We investigated the effects of age of acquisition (AOA), consistency, familiarity and imageability on reading accuracy for Kanji words in 245 typically developing sixth-graders. The children took a reading aloud test (STRAW-R) of 126 Kanji words. We analyzed error rates for the Kanji words chosen from the 126 so that their word attributes were controlled, in order to investigate the four target effects. Consistency, familiarity and imageability interacted with AOA significantly. These interactions indicated that 1) effects of consistency and familiarity were larger for high AOA words than low AOA words, 2) imageabiltiy effect was significant for high AOA words but not for low AOA words, and 3) no AOA effect was observed for high-imageability words. From these results we surmised that development of the sub-lexical and lexical processes can be known by investigating the effects of consistency, familiarity imageability respectively for low and high AOA words.