The purpose of this study was to examine what factors make the acquisition of sound-meaning knowledge of vocabulary difficult for children. Third- and fourth-grade elementary school students took a sound-meaning recognition test where they listened to a certain English sound (e.g., / p ǽ n d ә /), and chose the appropriate picture (a picture of panda) out of four options. The test included 28 katakana English with various numbers of phonemes and different word frequency levels. In this study, in addition, the author used an index that showed how well English pronunciation matched Japanese katakana pronunciation. This study found that (a) fourth-grade students had a higher score than third-grade students (92.9% vs. 84.3%), (b) both the number of phonemes and word frequency levels did not significantly affect the performance on the sound meaning recognition test, and (c) the more the English and katakana pronunciation matched, the higher the percentage of correct answers for that English word. This study indicated that words such as ruler and toe, whose English pronunciation does not match their Japanese katakana pronunciation, are difficult English words for elementary school students to recognize. Furthermore, it was suggested that adding the factor of whether children had already learned a particular English word might make the analysis even more precise.

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