Attainment Level of Hiragana Reading/Spelling in Kindergarten Children

Abstract

In this study, we investigated the attainment level of reading and spelling of Hiragana characters in 230 kindergarten children using the same method employed in earlier studies conducted by the National Language Research Institute (1972) and Shimamura and Mikami (1994). The tested children read 64.9 and spelled 43.0 out of 71 characters correctly on average. These results were similar to those of Shimamura and Mikami's report. Analysis of variance revealed the main effect of gender in the spelling task. The score of girls was higher than that of boys. This result coincides with the earlier study.