Emergent Reading of Japanese Hiragana via Stimulus Equivalence: A Preliminary Approach

This study evaluated an experimental procedure for establishing an emergent reading repertoire of Japanese Hiragana (a non-alphabetic script) using the stimulus equivalence paradigm. Three native Portuguese speakers were exposed to a matching-to-sample (MTS) procedure to establish conditional discriminations between dictated syllables (A), Hiragana characters (B), and their corresponding Romanized representations (C). After directly training AB and AC relations for ten Hiragana characters, participants were tested for the emergence of BC and CB relations, followed by emergent Hiragana reading tests. All participants reached over 97% accuracy in the emergent relations, demonstrating the formation of equivalence classes. Two participants successfully read between 85% and 100% of the Hiragana characters without direct reinforcement. These results highlight the "teaching economy" inherent in relational models and suggest that auditory-visual equivalence protocols are effective for promoting emergent reading with symbolic comprehension. The findings are discussed in terms of the effectiveness of the procedure for emergent reading.