抄録
The present study aimed to longitudinally investigate basic literacy skills and verbal memory at the end of the first term among Japanese second-graders and difficulty in reading kanji at the end of the third term. The participants were 1720 Japanese second-graders tested on their kanji reading skills; children with scores less than the 2.5th percentile were considered to have ‘severe difficulties.’ Under the risk conditions in which children showed combined occurrences of risk scores in the tests of abilities to write words with special morae, a word search and a test of digit span at the end of the first term, the odds ratios of children with severe difficulty in kanji reading ranged from 8.55 to 70.99. Since these odds ratios were much larger than the odds ratios for the single prevalence of each risk factor, multiple prevalence of the risk factors at the end of the first term seems likely to effectively predict the occurrence of severe difficulty with kanji reading in the third term.
