Cognitive profiling and preliminary subtyping in Chinese developmental dyslexia

Cross-Cultural/Linguistic Differences in the Prevalence of Developmental Dyslexia and the Hypothesis of Granularity and Transparency

“…Moreover, Mandarin Chinese has a large number of homophonic morphemes and homophonic characters. Therefore it is often stated that the use of phonological information may not be as critical in reading Chinese as it is in reading alphabetic languages (Ho, Chan, Lee, Tsang, & Luan, 2004;Ho, Chan, Tsang, & Lee, 2002;Shu, McBride-Chang,Wu, & Liu, 2006). If this were the case, then a high incidence of phonological dyslexia in Chinese should not be seen (cf the Hypothesis of Granularity and Transparency (Wydell & Butterworth, 1999)).…”

Typical and Dyslexic Development in Learning to Read Chinese

“…Previous studies have demonstrated that visual skill and orthographic awareness (e.g. Huang & Hanley, 1995;Ho & Bryant, 1997;Ho, Chan, Lee, Tsang, & Luan, 2004;Li, Peng, & Shu, 2006;Li, Shu, McBride-Chang, Liu, & Peng, in press) play significant roles in Chinese reading development. The brain mechanism of orthographic processing in Chinese reading were also reported in the fMRI studies (Liu, Zhang, Tang, Mai, Chen, Tardif & Luo, 2008;Tan, Liu, Perfetti, Spinks, Fox, & Gao, 2001;Wang, Yang, Shu & Zevin, 2011) The unit of interface between the written word and spoken language in Chinese is morpheme.…”

“…The role of morphological awareness, visual-orthographic skills, and rapid automatized naming in reading acquisition and impairment has also been demonstrated (e.g., Ho et al, 2004;Shu et al, 2006). What assessments can best examine those cognitive skills and are most sensitive to differences in reading ability at different stages of development?…”

“…Research has revealed that, just like in alphabetic languages, dyslexic children in Chinese mainly suffered from the accuracy and speed of word reading and spelling, so that reading measures widely used in distinguishing dyslexic from normal children are single character or word recognition measures ( (Ho, et. al, 2002(Ho, et. al, , 2004Meng, Shu & Zhou, 1999;Shu, Wu, McBride-Chang, 2006).…”

“…Testing 147 Hong Kong children with dyslexia on a number of literacy and cognitive tasks, Ho, et al (2004) found that rapid naming deficit (57%) and orthographic deficit (42%) were the most dominant types of cognitive deficits in Chinese developmental dyslexia, while the relatively small proportion of dyslexic children has phonological deficits (29%) and visual deficits (27%). Shu, et al (2006) specifically examined the role of morphological skills in Chinese dyslexia besides other cognitive skills.…”