Describes growth in the number of studies of behavior development conducted in Japan during the last 20 years and identifies areas of development receiving attention by Japanese researchers. (RH)

Examines research on comparative differences in reading disabilities to determine whether findings corroborate the belief that learning to read in Japanese produces fewer reading disabilities resulting from its writing system. Suggests that there is no perfect orthography and that a small percentage of children will have difficulty in learning to…

There are several reasons why Japan has one of the world's highest literacy rates. One reason is the nature of the Japanese written language, which employs a dual code of ideographs representing specific objects and a syllabary, in which each symbol represents a separate syllable. The syllable symbols are read consistently the same way, and…