The purpose of this study was to investigate how native and non-native learners of Japanese develop the ability to read kanji in on- and kun-readings, and the ability to use the appropriate on- and kun--readings when reading kanji compound words. Native Japanese adults, fifth graders, and JFL learners were recruited and tested using naming tasks.
The data in naming single characters indicated that the kun- reading skill was developed earlier than the on-reading skill regardless of the learning background. The data also revealed that the ability of the fifth graders, but not the JFL learners, to name kanji in kun-readings was comparable to that of the native Japanese adults whereas the ability to name kanji in on-readings was significantly different among the three groups.
In naming kanji compound words, both the native Japanese groups performed better in naming on-compound words than kun- compound words, the JFL learners named on- and kun- compound words at similar accurate rates.
In conclusion, there seem to have different factors that affect the development of the two types of kanji readings: i.e., the kun- reading is more closely bound to the spoken skills and the on- reading to literacy experience; more specifically, to the knowledge of kanji compound words. These results support that in Japanese the spoken and written vocabulary do not overlap as much as in English (Amano et al., 1995) and learning kanji vocabulary is dependent on the reader's literacy experience (Gale, 1986). Thus, considering the maturity of JFL learners, their literary experience in their L1, and their limited amount of time for Japanese language acquisition, the results suggest that it may be more crucial to introduce the written language to JFL learners from early stages than we have ever thought.