Abstract
The purpose of the present study was to examine factors relating to the reading of kanji compound words by junior high school students who were deaf. Participants in the study, 41 students who were deaf (14 from 7th grade, 13 from 8th grade, and 14 from 9th grade) and 96 age-matched peers with normal hearing acuity (17 from 7th grade, 37 from 8th grade, and 42 from 9th grade), were asked to write the pronunciation of 2-character kanji phrases. There were 180 kanji characters in the tested kanji compounds. Each kanji could be described in terms of 3 factors: (a) its complexity (the number of strokes needed to write it), (b) its associated mental imagery (the degree of concreteness of its meaning), and (c) its consistency (the number of possible pronunciations). The developmental features in reading the kanji words by both groups of participants were basically the same, but some delay was found in the students who were deaf. For the students who were deaf, kanji reading was more influenced by the number of possible pronunciations, compared to their peers with normal hearing. Japanese kanji can usually be pronounced in two or even more ways. The students who were deaf made many more errors on kanji that had many different possible pronunciations. It seems likely that it would be difficult for students who are deaf and have restricted hearing and pronunciation abilities to distinguish different pronunciations of the same kanji, and also difficult for them to associate different meanings with the different pronunciations of a kanji character.
