Learning to Read Chinese: Universal and Unique Cognitive Cores

Abstract

How do children learn to read Chinese? Three abilities identified as cognitive cores for reading in alphabetic orthographies are letter knowledge, phonemic awareness, and rapid automatized naming (RAN;Hulme & Snowling, 2013). What are the cognitive cores for Chinese? Identifying such cores is important for two reasons. First, if they can be identified, cores can be tested early to distinguish those children who might be at risk for reading difficulties, helping prevent and remediate dyslexia. Second, training of such core abilities might facilitate more optimal word recognition and word writing over time. In other words, identifying such core abilities can suggest more effective ways to teach early Chinese literacy skills. In this article, we argue that phonological sensitivity, RAN, and morphological awareness are cores for Chinese learning. In addition, visual-orthographic abilities may be associated causally with Chinese literacy skills over time.How is Chinese reading development unique? This question is easiest to answer for children learning to read in alphabetic scripts. Letter knowledge, phonemic awareness, and rapid automatized naming (RAN) are three cognitive cores for word recognition in alphabetic orthographies (1). For example, both letter-name knowledge and phoneme awareness are associated longitudinally with learning to read (2). Moreover, training in letter-sound knowledge and phoneme awareness along with direct reading instruction improve later word-level reading and spelling skills (3). RAN is also uniquely associated concurrently and longitudinally with children's alphabetic reading skills (4, 5).In this article, we highlight features of Chinese to identify universal and unique cognitive cores for learning to read Chinese. Although much is known about how children learn to read, most of that work has examined children learning to read in English or other alphabetic orthographies. We and others have studied children learning to read in Chinese, both to test the generality of findings from research on English-speaking children and to provide insights into how Chinese children master this skill.Perhaps the most striking features of the Chinese language to people who speak Indo-European languages are a relatively simplistic phonemic structure, the importance of lexical tones for distinguishing the meanings of words, and an abundance of homophones and homographs. Each Chinese character typically represents a spoken syllable and a morpheme (6). All Chinese characters occupy a square-shaped space in which the components are written roughly from top to bottom and from left to right to maintain a uniform size. Each character is composed of strokes (e.g., 一、丨、ヽ) that eventually comprise radicals (e.g., 宀、广、殳), or larger components made up of strokes that recur across characters. More than 80% of Chinese characters are made up of two such components, namely a phonetic and a semantic radical. The semantic radical typically provides a clue to the character's meaning, and the phonetic radical indicates somet...

Differences in Counting Skills Between Chinese and German Children Are Accompanied by Differences in Processing of Approximate Numerical Magnitude Information

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