Cross-Linguistic Word Recognition Development Among Chinese Children: A Multilevel Linear Mixed-Effects Modeling Approach

Abstract

The effects of psycholinguistic variables on reading development are critical to the evaluation of theories about the reading system. Although we know that the development of reading depends on both individual differences (endogenous) and itemlevel effects (exogenous), developmental research has focused mostly on average-level performance, ignoring individual differences. We investigated how the development of word recognition in Chinese children in both Chinese and English is affected by (a) item-level, exogenous effects (word frequency, radical consistency, and curricular grade level); (b) subject-level, endogenous individual differences (orthographic awareness and phonological awareness); and (c) their interactive effect. We tested native Chinese (Putonghua)-speaking children (n = 763) in grades 1 to 6 with both Chinese character and English word identification (lexical) decision tasks. Our findings show that (a) there were effects of both word frequency and age of acquisition in both Chinese and English, but these item-level effects generally weakened with increasing age; (b) individual differences in phonological and orthographic awareness each contributed to successful performance; and (c) in Chinese, item-level effects were weaker for more proficient readers. We contend that our findings can be explained by theoretical models that incorporate cumulative learning as the basis for development of item-level effects in the reading system.

Does Early Exposure to Chinese–English Biliteracy Enhance Cognitive Skills?

“…In addition, the linguistic features and the learners’ characteristics should be considered jointly as suggested by previous studies on word recognition in both Chinese and English ( Guan and Fraundorf, 2020a ; Guan et al, 2020b ). Our findings support Guan et al (2020b) , who through longitudinal comparison showed that word-recognition abilities are script-specific at first.…”

“…That is, early script effects are influenced by an item-by-subject interaction in each language, with item-level features of the newly learned language interacting with characteristics of individual participants. Previous studies have shown that the consistency of words, orthographic awareness, morphological awareness, and linguistic abilities interact ( Guan and Fraundorf, 2020a ). In addition, effects at the item level generally decrease with age, as individual differences in participants’ linguistic awareness (e.g., orthographic awareness and morphological awareness) contribute more to successful performance.…”

“…In addition, effects at the item level generally decrease with age, as individual differences in participants’ linguistic awareness (e.g., orthographic awareness and morphological awareness) contribute more to successful performance. In Chinese, the more skilled a reader is, the weaker the item-level by participant-level interaction effect is Guan and Fraundorf (2020a) , Wang et al (2021) . Although there are no specific item-level factors involved in the current study, our results suggest that such script-specific features might be physically active, though the effect of these features gradually decreases with the degree of language acquisition ( Mishra and Singh, 2014 ).…”

“…The English and Chinese word recognition measures involved lexical decision tasks ( Guan and Fraundorf, 2020a ; Guan et al, 2020b ). To select materials for the lexical decision task in Chinese, we randomly sampled 240 characters (40 from each grade level from grade 1 to grade 6) from the standard curriculum, ensuring that the items were representative of the compound regularities and configurations of Chinese characters.…”

Exploring Relationships Between L2 Chinese Character Writing and Reading Acquisition From Embodied Cognitive Perspectives: Evidence From HSK Big Data

“…Over the past two decades, many cross-disciplinary scholars have attempted to solve these problems. These studies mainly focused on character recognition (e.g., Siok and Fletcher, 2001 ; Liao et al, 2008 ; Guan and Fraundorf, 2020 ; Jiang et al, 2020 ; Zhang H. et al, 2020 ; Zimmer and Fischer, 2020 ; Guan et al, 2021 ), without considering the role of the embodiment of handwriting, which is deemed essential to the embodied cognition theory (ECT). Specifically, the ECT underlines the interaction among perception, action, body, and the environment ( Barsalou, 2008 ).…”