Background: In opaque orthographies, such as English, children with low reading skills tend to rely more on semantic information due to their inadequate acquisition of sub-lexical knowledge. This tendency has also been reported for kanji, a non-alphabetic and opaque Japanese orthography. However, previous studies on this phenomenon have had…

Japanese students with developmental disabilities often exhibit difficulties in reading, particularly in Kanji (ideogram) reading, and in acquiring the equivalence relations between pictures, written words, and sounds. Previous research suggested that one student with autism could acquire Kanji reading along with equivalence relations through…

The effect of parafoveal noise information on a Hirakana target-recognition task was investigated in good and poor readers from first and second grades. A differential effect of parafoveal noise produced a longer or shorter variation in reaction time depending on kind of surrounding material. Filtering mechanism efficiency differences are…

It is estimated that approximately 15% of the school children in the United States have reading problems, while only about 1% of students in Japan have such difficulties. A joint study was conducted by researchers in the two countries to identify possible causes for this difference. Subjects were 61 Japanese kindergarten students in an urban…

The articulatory awareness task, which was found by Griffiths and Frith (2002) to discriminate ex-dyslexic from non-dyslexic adults, was given to three groups of Japanese college students with different English reading abilities. Two unexpected results emerged: (1) Articulatory awareness performance was generally poor across the groups, thereby…