Rapid naming speed and Chinese character recognition

Abstract

We examined the relationship between rapid naming speed (RAN) and Chinese character recognition accuracy and fluency. Sixty-three grade 2 and 54 grade 4 Taiwanese children were administered four RAN tasks (colors, digits, Zhu-Yin-Fu-Hao, characters), and two character recognition tasks. RAN tasks accounted for more reading variance in grade 4 than in grade 2, and graphological RAN tasks accounted for more reading variance than RAN Colors. After controlling for age, nonverbal intelligence, phonological sensitivity, short-term memory, and orthographic processing, RAN tasks were significant predictors of character recognition fluency in grade 2, and of both accuracy and fluency in grade 4.

The role of rapid naming in reading development and dyslexia in Chinese

“…Both RAN tasks correlated strongly with One-Minute Reading but only weakly with Character Recognition. This finding is in line with that of previous studies showing that RAN is more strongly related to reading fluency than to reading accuracy (e.g., Georgiou et al, 2009;Liao et al, 2008;Savage & Frederickson, 2005;Song et al, in press). The PAL tasks did not correlate significantly with the RAN tasks, and for this reason we did not further examine the possibility of PAL mediating the RAN-reading relationship.…”

“…These findings are similar to those in previous studies in alphabetic orthographies (e.g., Georgiou et al, 2009;Landerl & Wimmer, 2008;Savage & Frederickson, 2005;Vaessen & Blomert, 2010) and in Chinese (e.g., Liao et al, 2008;Song et al, in press;Xue et al, 2013), and they suggest that RAN (particularly Digit Naming) is a strong predictor of reading fluency. Importantly, RAN accounted for 19% to 22% of unique variance in reading fluency over and above the effects of nonverbal IQ, phonological awareness, orthographic processing, and speed of processing.…”

“…We selected Grade 2 as our departure point because most previous longitudinal studies examining the role of RAN in word reading in Chinese covered the developmental span from kindergarten to Grade 2 (e.g., Chow et al, 2005;Lei et al, 2011;Li, Shu, McBride-Chang, Liu, & Peng, 2012;McBride-Chang & Ho, 2005). Information regarding the contribution of RAN to reading in upper elementary grades is limited and derived primarily from concurrent and cross-sectional studies (e.g., Liao et al, 2008;Tan et al, 2005;Xue et al, 2013). These studies have shown that RAN continues to predict reading over and above phonological awareness (e. g., Liao et al, 2008;Tan et al, 2005) and orthographic processing (e.g., Liao et al, 2008;Yeung et al, 2011) but have not examined the joint effects of these processing skills along with processing speed in the RAN-reading relationship.…”

“…Information regarding the contribution of RAN to reading in upper elementary grades is limited and derived primarily from concurrent and cross-sectional studies (e.g., Liao et al, 2008;Tan et al, 2005;Xue et al, 2013). These studies have shown that RAN continues to predict reading over and above phonological awareness (e. g., Liao et al, 2008;Tan et al, 2005) and orthographic processing (e.g., Liao et al, 2008;Yeung et al, 2011) but have not examined the joint effects of these processing skills along with processing speed in the RAN-reading relationship. This is important in light of arguments that RAN operates as a ''lexical midpoint" in a cascaded system of processing speed effects (Wolf & Bowers, 1999).…”

Basic auditory processing and developmental dyslexia in Chinese

“…As might be expected, tone awareness is a unique predictor of reading acquisition in Chinese . Both RAN and phonological memory tasks are also significant predictors of reading acquisition in Chinese (as is also found in alphabetic languages; for Chinese see Ding, Richman, Yang, & Guo, 2010;Hu & Catts, 1998;Liao, Georgiou, & Parrila, 2008).…”