Chinese children's character recognition: Visuo‐orthographic, phonological processing and morphological skills

Abstract

Tasks tapping visual skills, orthographic knowledge, phonological awareness, speeded naming, morphological awareness and Chinese character recognition were administered to 184 kindergarteners and 273 primary school students from Beijing. Regression analyses indicated that only syllable deletion, morphological construction and speeded number naming were unique correlates of Chinese character recognition in kindergarteners. Among primary school children, the independent correlates of character recognition were rime detection, homophone judgement, morpheme production, orthographic knowledge and speeded number naming. Results underscore the importance of some dimensions of both phonological processing and morphological awareness for both very early and intermediate Chinese reading acquisition. Although significantly correlated with character recognition in younger (but not older) children, visual skills were not uniquely associated with Chinese character reading at any grade level. However, orthographic skills were strongly associated with reading in primary school but not kindergarten, suggesting that orthographic skills are more important for literacy development as reading experience increases.

The influence of orthographic experience on the development of phonological preparation in spoken word production

“…All participants were instructed to read the symbols one by one while their accuracy was recorded. In addition, a character reading task based on Li, Shu, McBride-Chang, Liu, and Peng (2012) was used, in which all participants were asked to read from the beginning and stopped when they failed to read 15 consecutive items. Both tests were paper based and used 24-point type size for each pinyin or character.…”

“…There has been converging evidence to support that the acquisition of orthographic knowledge influences the development of awareness of various phonological units (see Ziegler & Goswami, 2005, for an overview). In particular, the learning of alphabetic orthographies enhances phonemic awareness (Castles & Coltheart, 2004;Lukatela, Carello, Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1995;Morais, Cary, Alegria, & Bertelson, 1979). Read, Zhang, Nie, and Ding (1986) showed that Chinese adults who had not learned pinyin performed significantly worse in adding and deleting phonemes, as compared to their counterparts who had similar education level and could read both Chinese characters and pinyin.…”

Current Perspectives on Prevention of Reading and Writing Learning Disabilities

“…These studies assign varying degrees of importance to the various factors [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28]. We analyze below some of the main predictive factors that have been recognized as important in a majority of studies from recent decades.…”

“…Different levels of phonological awareness are identified: syllabic, intrasyllabic, and phonemic. The literature includes many research studies that demonstrate that syllabic knowledge and especially phonemic knowledge are strong predictors of reading and writing in students with and without dyslexia at early ages (4-7-year-olds), and in languages with differing orthographic consistency such as Spanish, Italian, Greek, English, Chinese, Arabic, and others [21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28].…”

Assessing Young Hungarian EFL Learners’ Vocabulary and Learning Strategies

“…Due to the lacuna of research on FL vocabulary learning in a formal context, attention needs to be cast on NL lexical learning, vocabulary development of bilingual students and FL word learning in context when the target language is the medium of interaction (Cameron, 2004). Mainly words association tests and translation tasks have been used to explore the NL and FL vocabulary development of YLs (Li, Shu, McBride-Chang, Liu & Peng, 2012;Qing & Ching, 2015).…”