Although many studies have reported child literacy development, it still remains unclear when and how toddlers
acquire letters well before starting formal education. We focused on Japanese hiragana letters to investigate
(a) when toddlers begin to understand hiragana, and (b) what kind of letters is easily acquired. Our eyetracking
experiment showed that toddlers at 32-39 months begin to understand hiragana letter-sound mapping.
Moreover, our large-scaled corpus analysis found that different factors such as letter frequency in picture books
and visual complexity contribute to the acquisition of hiragana reading and writing. We aim to extend our
findings to develop early detection method and letter learning method for children with reading difficulties.
References
[1] H. Higuchi, Y. Okumura, T. Kobayashi, “Acquisition of letter-sound correspondence in Japanese-speaking 2-year-olds: An eye-tracking study”
in Biennial Meeting of Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD), 2019.
[2] H. Higuchi, Y. Okumura, T. Kobayashi “Influence of letter properties for Japanese hiragana reading and writing acquisition” The Japan Journal
of Logopedics and Phoniatrics, Vol.60 No.2, 113-120, 2019.
[3] H. Higuchi, Y. Okumura, T. Kobayashi “Influence of letter properties for Japanese katakana reading and writing acquisition” The Japan
Journal of Logopedics and Phoniatrics(in press).