Concurrent Correlates of Chinese Word Recognition in Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children

Abstract

The aim of this study was to explore the relative contributions of phonological, semantic radical, and morphological awareness to Chinese word recognition in deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children. Measures of word recognition, general intelligence, phonological, semantic radical, and morphological awareness were administered to 32 DHH and 35 hearing children in Hong Kong. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that tone, semantic radical, and morphological awareness made independent contributions to word recognition in DHH children after the effects of age and intelligence were statistically controlled for. Semantic radical and morphological awareness was found to explain significantly more variance than tone awareness in predicting word recognition in DHH children. This study has replicated previous evidence regarding the importance of semantic radical and morphological awareness in Chinese word recognition in hearing children and extended its significance to DHH children.

Differences and Similarities in the Contributions of Phonological Awareness, Orthographic Knowledge and Semantic Competence to Reading Fluency in Chinese School-Age Children With and Without Hearing Loss

“…Interestingly, in contrast to our prediction, children with HL showed poorer performance on OK than their peers with NH. Our result was different from previous findings that children with HL showed equivalent and even better performance on orthographic processing compared with their peers with NH (Vermeulen et al, 2007;Domínguez et al, 2014Domínguez et al, , 2019Ching and Nunes, 2015). The inconsistency might be related with different tasks adopted to measure OK in these studies (e.g., visual word recognition, meta-phonological awareness and radical awareness).…”

“…This study investigated the performances of Chinese school-age children with HL on reading fluency and a series of linguistic subskills compared with their peers with NH, and the differences and similarities between the two groups in the contributions of phonological, orthographic and semantic skills to reading fluency. The detrimental effects that hearing impairment has on the development of reading ability and related subskills have been investigated by many previous studies in alphabetic (Geers, 2003;Johnson and Goswami, 2010;Geers and Hayes, 2011;Qi and Mitchell, 2012;Harris et al, 2017) and nonalphabetic languages (Ching and Nunes, 2015;Zhao et al, 2019).…”

“…A very limited number of studies on reading of children with HL in the non-alphabetic Chinese writing system also revealed inconsistent results. For example, Ching and Nunes (2015) reported significant contribution of PA (lexical tone awareness) to word recognition accuracy in Chinese-speaking children with HL aged 7-12 years, whereas Chan and Yang (2018) found that PA (onset awareness and rime awareness) did not make a unique contribution to the amount of recognized Chinese characters in children with HL of grade 2. In a recent study by Zhao et al (2019), unique contribution of phonological awareness (onset awareness) to Chinese sentence reading fluency was found for children with HL of grades 5-6.…”

“…To our best knowledge, only one study has explored the contribution of OK to Chinese reading in children with HL. Specifically, Ching and Nunes (2015) found that one measurement of Chinese orthographic knowledge (semantic radical awareness) contributed significantly to two-character word recognition in children with HL aged 7-12 years. However, reading ability was measured only through word recognition accuracy in this study.…”

“…For example, in alphabetic writing systems, Connor and Zwolan (2004) found that vocabulary growth had a positive effect on passage comprehension in primary and middle school children with CIs and Von Muenster and Baker (2014) reported strong correlations between receptive/expressive language skills and passage reading comprehension in children with CIs aged 5-13 years. In non-alphabetic writing system, Ching and Nunes (2015) and Chan and Yang (2018) found that morphological awareness significantly predicted Chinese word recognition in primary school children with HL. Listening comprehension and receptive vocabulary knowledge also contributed significantly to early development of reading comprehension (Chan and Yang, 2018).…”