Children's understanding of the symbolic values of Japanese onomatopoeia : Contribution of knowledge about orthography

Abstract

In Japanese, onomatopoetic words beginning with a voiced/unvoiced consonant refer to a loud/quiet sound produced by a big/small object respectively. Japanese-speaking adults apply this rule not only in interpreting known pairs of onomatopoetic words that have contrasting voicing, but also in interpreting novel onomatopoetic words. The present study investigated Japanese-speaking children's understanding of this rule, focusing on the influence of their knowledge of the orthography of the Japanese writing system, specifically kana syllabary in which voiced and unvoiced consonants are systematically indicated by the attachment or non-attachment of a mark called dakuten to a character. Participants, all of whom were Japanese speakers, were 71 four-year-olds and 49 six-year-olds. The results showed that the 4-year-olds were able to apply the above rule not only in interpreting known onomatopoetic words, but also in interpreting novel onomatopoetic words. The children who could read at least 1 pair of characters with and without attached dakuten were more likely to generalize the rule to novel onomatopoetic words than were the children who could not read any dakuten-attached characters. Knowledge of the orthography of the Japanese writing system seemed to enable these young children to generalize symbolic values of onomatopoetic words with voicing contrasts.