Abstract
The aim of the present research was to examine abilities relating to the early development of phonological awareness in young children who were hard of hearing, through studying the relation between the ability to use numbers and the phonological awareness of 20 young children (ages 3 : 3 to 4 : 10) who were hard of hearing. The children did the following tasks: (a) a task of number and order, in which there were 4 conditions: imitation when the object could be seen, imitation when the object was hidden, a number-matching task, and a rhythm matching task, and (b) a phonological segmentation task, in which there were 2 conditions: phonological segmentation by imitation and phonological segmentation. The children who were about 4 years old became able to segment words into morae. Children younger than that showed that their abilities were developing in the task of number and order. The results suggested that acquisition of understanding and operating cardinal and ordinal numbers visually occurs before children are able to segment words into morae. These results partially support the hypothesis that young children who are hard of hearing analyze phonological structure with visual images, for example, finger-spelling, cued speech, and, in Japanese, kana characters.
