Characteristics of Hiragana and Katakana writing in children with developmental dyslexia, evaluated by the Screening Test of Reading and Writing for Japanese Primary School Children (STRAW)

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to identify the characteristics of Hiragana and Katakana writing among children with developmental dyslexia, as a means to help make fast and appropriate diagnoses for children with similar disability. A total of 618 Japanese primary school children, encompassing Grades 1 to 6, participated: 58 with developmental dyslexia and 560 developmentally normal. All participating children were tested on their writing skills in Hiragana and Katakana characters/words, using stimuli from the Screening Test of Reading and Writing for Japanese Primary School Children (STRAW) (2006). The results revealed three kinds of writing impairment specific to the dyslexic children: (1) younger children tended to make errors in the special syllables (e.g., t#> ?9 tz *> : yuudachi), but this tendency persisted in older dyslexic children as well; (2) the dyslexic children made more errors when writing isolated Hiragana characters than when writing full words; and (3) compared with the normally developing children, the dyslexic children made significantly more errors in writing Katakana than Hiragana. However, imageability effects in writing both types of Kana were evident in both groups in Grades 1 to 3. We concluded that these results would be of assistance in making fast and appropriate diagnoses of children with similar disability.