Abstract
The abilities to read characters and to repeat non-words have been reported to be related. Therefore, children with poor early reading skills could be expected to have difficulty with non-word repetition. The purposes of the present study were to investigate (a) whether young Japanese children with poor reading skills would have more difficulty with the repetition of non-words than would children with proficient reading skills, and (b) whether differences between the non-fluent and fluent reading groups could be identified in the characteristics of their errors. The non-fluent reading group was comprised of children who read words mora by mora; the fluent reading group was comprised of children who could read words fluently. The participants were 34 pre-school children from 5 to 6 years old. A reading task and a non-word repetition task were used. The results were as follows: The scores of the children in the non-fluent group on the non-word repetition task were significantly lower than the scores of the children in the fluent group. In addition, in the non-fluent group, the number of errors made on consonants was significantly greater than the number of errors made on vowels and others. In contrast, no such difference was observed in the fluent group. These results suggest that young children whose early reading is non-fluent may have more phonological difficulties than those whose reading is already fluent.
