This study investigated relationships between young children's reading of their own and friends' names and their acquisition of the Japanese syllabaries (kana). Sixty 3-and 4-year-old children were tested twice lngitudinally, reading their own names, friends' names, and kanasyllables, at an 8-month interval. The result was that there were individual differnces in the relationships between reading of names and kana, such that children were grouped into three characteristic types. First, a few children could read individual constituent kana, but could not read their own names. A second type could read their own names, but could not read all the constituent kana. Finally, there were some children who could read their own names including their family names, but who could not do so when they read friends' names. This last type seemed to learn to identify their own names as gestalts referring to themselves, prior to acquisition of individual constituent kana.
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