A Child with Intellectually Disabled Whose Difficulty in Reading Aloud is more Remarkable than that in Writing to Dictation in Hiragana Characters

Abstract

We taught to promote phonological awareness using Chinese characters to a child with an intellectual disability who had difficulty reading aloud hiragana, writing and reading aloud at the word level, despite his ability to write a single character of the hiragana syllabary. He didn’t have enough phonological awareness, automatic processing ability, and visual-cognitive ability for reading aloud, and couldn’t recall the sounds of the words. Although the visual cognitive abilities necessary for writing were insufficient, it was considered that he could recognize characters from their sounds and form a kinesthetic memory of hiragana characters through repetition of stroke order. The fact that he could recognize the sounds of words but couldn’t recall them was considered to be a major factor in his inability to read a single hiragana character, even though he could write it. Reading aloud tended to be difficult for a single hiragana character, but possible for a simple kanji character after one teaching session. It was possible to write to dictation a single hiragana character, but not a word or kanji. This was a rare case in which disability structures of reading and writing were different, and both of them developed independently at the level of a single hiragana character.