Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the use of Kanji in compositions of children / students and to estimate the ability of Kanji usage. For this investigation, we built the Written Composition Corpus of Japanese Elementary and Junior High School Students (WCCJS). This corpus comprises approximately one million words of compositions written by children and students from elementary (first grade) to junior high school (third grade). In this paper, we investigate the usage of Kanji according to grade from the order of learning, parts of speech, and word types. In addition, in contrast to the Balanced Composition Corpus by Written Japanese (BCCWJ) and compositions of university students, we analyzed the stylistic characteristics of children’s and student’s compositions, as well as the developmental process of Kanji usage ability based on the performance of university students.
