Lower prosodic sensitivity in Chinese children with dyslexia and its impact on Chinese reading

Abstract

The current study aims to examine prosodic sensitivity in Chinese children with dyslexia and its relation to Chinese reading in children with and without dyslexia. A total of 172 Chinese children from third grade to sixth grade in Taiwanese primary schools were recruited. Thirty (14 male) children were identified as having dyslexia, and the remaining children (N = 142; 67 male) were typically developing children matched with those with dyslexia as carefully as possible with respect to school, grade, and gender. Our results indicated that group differences were found for all three types of prosodic sensitivity. Moderation analyses showed that group had no significant interaction with prosodic sensitivity in predicting Chinese reading, so the participants in the two groups were combined in the following analyses. The results of the stepwise regression analyses showed that only lexical tone awareness could significantly predict Chinese character reading after controlling for phonological awareness, while only intonation awareness could significantly predict reading comprehension after controlling for Chinese character reading. The results provide preliminary evidence on the issue of prosodic sensitivity in Chinese children with dyslexia and its role in Chinese reading, which might provide a novel approach to the teaching of Chinese languages.

Relationships Between State Anxiety and Reading Comprehension of Chinese Students With and Without Dyslexia: A Cross-Sectional Design

“…Unlike alphabetic languages, the smallest unit of meaning in Chinese is the Chinese character, which can be constructed by approximately 620 stroke patterns (Chung et al., 2008). It is demanding for beginning readers to learn analyzing the structures of Chinese characters, not to mention the most frequent unit in Chinese passage, that is, two- to three-character vocabularies (Wang et al., 2022), to retrieve the meaning. Thus, the foci of Chinese lessons in the early and middle primary school ages are character recognition with a subsequent gradual move to comprehension afterward.…”