Two hypotheses have been suggested to explain why young children cannot adequately understand the emotional states of characters in narratives: a) they tend to ignore information about motives and make judgments based on information about outcomes, or b) they make judgments based only on information that is most easily obtained in the absence of detailed analyses. In this study, I examine both hypotheses with a sample of 27 children in their final year of kindergarten. By changing the position of a “reversal sentence” that contains information about motives, I established two conditions: a “prior-location condition” and a “post-location condition”. The results of categorizing responses indicated that the children did not make judgments based on information about outcomes. However, their judgments were not influenced in either the prior -or post-location conditions. This finding supports the hypothesis that failures of young children to understand the emotional states of characters are due to insufficient analyses of details. Furthermore, error analysis suggested that difficulties with integrating contradictory propositions also cause errors in understanding the emotional states of characters.

Readers interpret the emotional states of narrative characters through inference. However,it is not possible to draw appropriate inferences without adequate comprehension of the narratives themselves. Uehara (2009) found that some 5-year-old children had inappropriate comprehension of some narratives and that they persisted in their misunderstandings despite the availability of information concerning the appropriate interpretation. Accordingly, this study investigates narrative comprehension, the source of comprehension, and the process by which information is integrated into an understanding of fictional characters within 4- and 5-year-old children. The results indicate that some 4-year-old children failed to appropriately interpret the emotional states, due to poor narrative comprehension, and that some of the 5-year-old children also failed to appropriately interpret emotional states,despite adequately comprehending the narratives. These results suggest that 1) the ability of 4-year-old children to read and comprehend a narrative is still undeveloped, which leads to misinterpretations of characters' emotional states, and 2) 5-year-old children miscomprehend characters' emotional states because they fail to appreciate the importance of the consistency between the narrative and the characters' emotions.

This study investigates the effects of “main ideas selecting” and “main ideas organizing” activities on second language learners' comprehension of expository texts. A total of 68 intermediate-level students of Japanese participated in the study. The participants were assigned to one of 4 groups: 1) a “main ideas selecting” group, 2) a “main ideas selecting” and “main ideas organizing” group, 3) a “main ideas organizing” group, and 4) a control group. After the reading activities, a recall test was conducted. The results indicate that the “main ideas selecting” activity assisted comprehension of the main ideas and that the “main ideas organizing” activity facilitated comprehension of the text's structure. Moreover, the “main ideas selecting” activity facilitated second language learners in producing elaborate inferential information. Finally, the roles of the “main ideas selection” and the “main ideas organization”activities for second language learners are discussed.

The process of recognizing printed words has been studied for many years. Recent visual word recognition research suggests that the identification of a word is affected by its similarity to other words. Coltheart,Davelaar,Jonasson,and Besner (1977) defined an orthographic neighbor as any word that can be generated by replacing one letter of a word. Many studies have shown that neighborhood size affects visual word recognition. The figurative similarity of neighbors can be defined in terms of the figurative similarities of component letters. The purpose of this study is to develop figurative similarity norms for Japanese hiragana in order to consider a more stringent definition of neighbors and to investigate neighborhood effects for Japanese hiragana words. In this article,the figurative similarity of hiragana refers to subjective ratings made to pairings of hiragana. In the study,a set of 71 hiragana was selected,and these were paired to form 2,485 (＝71 x 70/2) hiragana pairings. The hiragana pairings were divided into 25 stimuli lists. The 25 lists were constructed by randomly arranging the stimuli. A second set of 25 lists was also constructed by reversing the order of items on the first set of lists. The resultant 50 stimuli lists were presented to 1,750 university students for subjective evaluations concerning the figurative similarity of each hiragana pairing on a 5-point scale,ranging from 1 (not similar) to 5 (very similar). The results are reported in Table 2. The table may be employed as normative figurative similarity data when conducting experiments involving Japanese hiragana words.

Children in the lower grades of elementary school both have books read to them by teachers and read aloud themselves to foster their reading abilities. However, it is doubtful whether reading lessons involving spoken language are also effective for later graders, because the dependence on spoken language may reduce as reading ability develops. The purpose of this study is to elucidate the developmental transition from a speech for superiority to written language in order to examine how spoken language can be effectively utilized in fostering reading ability. In Study 1,174 Japanese elementary-school children were asked to perform listening and reading comprehension tasks. The results indicate that first- and second-graders perform better on the listening task compared to the reading task. The difference between listening and reading comprehension was smaller for third -and fourth-graders, and disappeared for upper graders. In Study 2,360 Japanese elementary-school children were asked to evaluate the intelligibility of a text either when they listened to it, whey they read it aloud, or read it silently. The results indicate that first-graders prefer to listen than read themselves, while upper graders prefer reading to listening. Furthermore, first- graders prefer reading aloud more than reading silently, while upper graders prefer reading silently than reading aloud. The preferences for listening and reading aloud were correlated. These findings suggest that first- and second-graders comprehend speech better than written language, but that the superiority for speech disappears with the development of reading abilities. Moreover, reading lessons that utilize spoken language would seem to be more effective for first- and second-grade children.