Is awareness of morae a requisite for acquisition of kana reading?

Abstract

A wareness of morae, which is believed to be the most important requisite for acquisition of kana reading, was investigated with a mentally retarded child. It has been maintained that awareness of morae is a requisite for learning to name each kana character, but the author proposes that the former is not necessary for the latter, but is required for reading comprehension. To test the hypothesis, the subject, who named most of kana characters but could not understand written words, was trained to segment words into morae and identify each morae in order to raise the level of his awareness of morae; and then he was tested for the comprehension of written words. It was found that the subject was not aware of morae at first, but through the training of moraic awareness he was led to comprehend written words. Thus it was concluded that awareness of morae is a requisite for reading comprehension.