Weaknesses in Semantic, Syntactic and Oral Language Expression Contribute to Reading Difficulties in Chinese Dyslexic Children

Abstract

The present study examined the role of weaknesses in some language skills for the reading difficulties among Chinese dyslexic children. Thirty Chinese dyslexic children were compared with 30 chronological age (CA) controls and 30 reading-level (RL) controls on a number of language and reading measures. The results showed that Chinese dyslexic children performed significantly worse than the CA controls but similarly to the RL controls in many of the linguistic measures except that the dyslexic group also performed significantly less well than the RL group in semantic skills and syntactic skills on multiple modifiers. The dyslexic children were found to have difficulties in semantic processing, syntactic skills and oral language expression as compared with the CA controls, which were also found to predict their performance in word recognition and/or sentence comprehension. In addition, measures of semantic discrimination, advanced syntactic word order, and oral narrative also significantly predicted the group membership of having or not having dyslexia. These findings suggest that weaknesses in some semantic and advanced syntactic skills are the potential source of poor word and sentence reading in Chinese developmental dyslexia. Implications of the present findings for the identification of dyslexia were discussed.

A moving story: Whole-body motor training selectively improves the appraisal of action meanings in naturalistic narratives

“…To address both questions, we implemented a videogame-based motor training protocol and assessed the appraisal of actions in narratives through discourse-level processes subsuming multiple operations (e.g., word access, syntactic parsing, semantic integration, memory retrieval). Strategically, our intervention was aimed at dyslexic children, whose potential comprehension deficits 3 , 4 could give room to post-training improvements. As in previous research on text-level action appraisal 5 , our approach allows examining whether embodied language mechanisms remain operative despite the conflation of processes typical of daily verbal activity.…”

“…To test this notion, we assessed processing of information in two types of short stories –“action texts” (ATs) and “neutral texts” (NTs)– before and after motor training. We targeted dyslexic children, a population with intact motor abilities, potentially suboptimal comprehension skills 3 , 4 , and susceptibility to videogame-induced effects 15 . Our training protocol required participants to play whole-body AVGs on a Nintendo Wii, which allowed us to circumvent some of the artificial constraints characterizing classical paradigms in cognitive science (such as the continuous performance of a single motor action in the context of an otherwise static body).…”

Neurocognitive Development and Predictors of L1 and L2 Literacy Skills in Dyslexia: A Longitudinal Study of Children 5–11 Years Old

“…Baddeley, 2000;Kibby & Cohen, 2008) and language comprehension (see e.g. Helland, 2007;Helland & Kaasa, 2005;Snowling, Bishop, & Stothard, 2000;Xiao & Ho, 2013).…”

Verbal Short‐Term Memory Deficits in Chinese Children with Dyslexia may not be a Problem with the Activation of Phonological Representations

“…Studies in alphabetic scripts have reported a functionally important phonological processing deficit in many dyslexics (Ramus, ; Ramus & Ahissar, ; Ramus, Marshall, Rosen, & van der Lely, ; Hoeft et al ., ; Shaywitz et al ., ; Boets et al ., ). In studies using Chinese characters, phonological problems were also found (Ho, Law, & Ng, ; Cheung et al ., ; Liu, Shu, & Yang, ), but these were not considered core deficits; rather, impairments in orthographic processing and morpheme awareness were thought to be more important (Ho, Chan, Tsang, & Lee, ; Ho, Chan, Lee, Tsang, & Luan, ; Chung, Ho, Chan, Tsang, & Lee, , ; Shu, McBride‐Chang, Wu, & Liu, ; Shu, Peng, & McBride‐Chang, ; Xiao & Ho, ).…”