Treatment to Facilitate Reading Kana Sentences Through Improvement in Reading Sight Vocabulary: Children With Specific Reading Disabilities

The present study aimed to investigate effects of a treatment that promoted the process of reading sight vocabulary on the reading of kana sentences. The participants were 10 elementary school children with learning disabilities (LD), 5 of whom had specific reading disabilities and 5 of whom did not. Their vocal reaction times to meaningful kana words were measured. The number of correctly and fluently read phrases in the non-treatment sentences increased in the children with specific reading disabilities whose vocal reaction times to meaningful kana words had decreased after the treatment. These results suggest that effects of the treatment were observed in the reading of kana sentence by the children with specific reading disabilities. Those effects might have been a consequence of an improvement in the process of reading sight vocabulary.