Cognitive-Linguistic Skills Underlying Word Reading and Spelling Difficulties in Chinese Adolescents With Dyslexia

Abstract

The present study investigated the co-occurrence of word reading and spelling difficulties for Chinese first language (L1) and English second language (L2) and the role of morphological awareness in word reading and spelling ability across two languages. A total of 110 Hong Kong Chinese-speaking students in Grade 7, including 55 adolescents with dyslexia (28 males, mean age = 152.11 months) and 55 typically developing adolescents (27 males, mean age = 151.85 months) participated. They were assessed on the cognitive-linguistic measures of morphological awareness, phonological awareness, vocabulary knowledge, rapid naming, word reading, and word spelling in L1 and L2. Multivariate analysis of variance showed that compared with the typical students, adolescents with dyslexia had poorer performance in all L1 and L2 measures except the phonological awareness in Chinese. Hierarchical regression analysis indicated that for both groups of students, morphological awareness contributed uniquely to word reading and spelling in L1 and L2; rapid letter naming contributed uniquely to English word spelling. Findings highlight the importance of co-occurring difficulties in L1 and L2 reading and spelling and that morphological awareness may play a critical role in predicting word reading and spelling across languages for Chinese adolescents with dyslexia and those without difficulty.

The Prevalence of Dyslexia in Primary School Children and Their Chinese Literacy Assessment in Shantou, China

“…Besides, evidence from an eight-year, longitudinal study has suggested that phonological awareness provides the basis for the development of morphological awareness in Chinese, which is a better indicator for predicting children’s future reading development [ 40 ]. In addition, studies have revealed that rapid automatized naming deficits play an important role in predicting the incidence of dyslexia [ 35 , 37 ], which is consistent with our results. Rapid automatic naming was strongly associated with early childhood reading skills, and it might be related to speech processing ability and auditory processing impairment.…”

“…As far as we know, this is the first study to explore the relationship between dyslexia and cognitive-linguistic skills in mainland China. Language processing deficits are commonly reported in dyslexia, including deficits of phonological awareness, morpheme awareness, orthographic awareness, and rapid automatic naming [35][36][37], which is in line with our findings. According to our results, compared with the control group, the scores for rhyme, onset, and tone identification in the dyslexic children were significantly lower.…”

What Predicts First‐ and Second‐Language Difficulties? Testing Language and Executive Functioning Skills as Correlates

“…Children in PE and PB scored consistently lower in Chinese and English vocabulary knowledge than the readers in PC and C. Vocabulary knowledge is another aspect of meaning linked to bidirectional relations of reading acquisition and difficulties (Chung & Lam, 2020; McBride‐Chang et al., 2013). That is, children often learn concepts and use common knowledge during reading, and vocabulary knowledge is important to reading comprehension (Anderson & Freebody, 1981).…”

“…As in the phonological awareness tests used in previous studies (Chung & Lam, 2020; Keung & Ho, 2009; Yeung & Ganotice, 2014), a rhyme detection and phoneme deletion task were used. In the rhyme detection task, children were required to listen to 17 items of three monosyllabic rhymes and subsequently indicate which two items sounded similar for each trial.…”

“…According to the Central Processing Hypothesis (Geva & Siegel, 2000), cross‐language transfer may indicate the presence of a set of more foundational linguistic and cognitive skills, such as phonological awareness, rapid naming, and working memory, that are crucial to the learning of both L1 and L2 (Geva & Siegel, 2000). In a similar vein, difficulties in these language and cognitive skills are related to reading difficulties in both Chinese (L1) and English (L2) (Chung & Lam, 2020; McBride et al., 2012). Taken together, therefore, there may be a common linguistic and cognitive basis for reading difficulties in L1 and L2 among bilingual children.…”