Exhibition Program

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.