Catherine McBride

Cues For Lexical Tone Perception In Children: Acoustic Correlates And Phonetic Context Effects

PURPOSE The authors investigated the effects of acoustic cues (i.e., pitch height, pitch contour, and pitch onset and offset) and phonetic context cues (i.e., syllable onsets and rimes) on lexical tone perception in Cantonese-speaking children. METHOD Eight minimum pairs of tonal contrasts were presented in either an identical phonetic context or in different phonetic contexts (different syllable onsets and rimes). Children were instructed to engage in tone identification and tone discrimination. RESULTS Cantonese children attended to pitch onset in perceiving similarly contoured tones and attended to pitch contour in perceiving different-contoured tones. There was a decreasing level of tone discrimination accuracy, with tone perception being easiest for same rime-different syllable onset, more difficult for different rime-same syllable onset, and most difficult for different rime-different syllable onset phonetic contexts. This pattern was observed in tonal contrasts in which the member tones had the same contour but not in ones in which the member tones had different contours. CONCLUSION These findings suggest that in addition to pitch contour, the pitch onset is another important acoustic cue for tone perception. The relative importance of acoustic cues for tone perception is phonetically context dependent. These findings are discussed with reference to a newly modified TRACE model for tone languages (TTRACE).

Chinese Kindergartners Learn to Read Characters Analytically

Do Chinese children implicitly extract information from Chinese print before they are formally taught to read? We examined Chinese kindergartners’ sensitivity to regularities in Chinese characters and the relationship between such sensitivity and later literacy ability. Eighty-five kindergartners from Beijing were given a character-learning task and assessed on word reading and word writing twice within a 1-year interval. Sensitivity to the structural and phonetic regularities in Chinese appeared in 4-year-olds, and sensitivity to the positions of radicals in Chinese characters emerged in 5-year-olds. Such sensitivities explained unique variance in Chinese word reading and writing 1 year later, with age and nonverbal IQ statistically controlled. Young children detected regularities in written Chinese before they received formal instruction in it, which underscores both the importance of early statistical learning for literacy development and the analytic properties of Chinese print.

Chinese Children’s Statistical Learning of Orthographic Regularities: Positional Constraints and Character Structure

This study examined how Chinese children acquire the untaught positional constraints of stroke patterns that are embedded in left–right structured and top–bottom structured characters. Using an orthographic regularity pattern elicitation paradigm, 536 Hong Kong Chinese children at different levels of reading (kindergarten, 2nd, and 5th grades) were asked to produce invented characters with left–right and top–bottom stroke pattern pairs. Even kindergartners were aware of the positional constraints of stroke patterns and were able to produce orthographically legal pseudocharacters with different stroke pattern pairs. This ability improved across grade level. Moreover, there was a production asymmetry in which children produced more top–bottom structured pseudocharacters than left–right structured pseudocharacters. The error pattern analysis further revealed that more positional errors were observed in producing left–right structured noncharacters than in the top–bottom structured noncharacters. This production asymmetry seemed to reflect children’s experience with a distribution asymmetry observed between left–right (59.19%) and top–bottom structured characters (23.46%) in a corpus of school Chinese. These results are discussed within the framework of statistical learning of orthographic regularity in Chinese.

Character reading and word reading in Chinese: Unique correlates for Chinese kindergarteners

We considered the extent to which learning to read Chinese characters and Chinese words (operationally defined as composed of two or more characters) are different in the present study. Study 1 compared reading of the same characters in isolation and those in the context of known words for 63 Chinese third-year kindergarteners. Results showed that children performed significantly better on reading the same characters when embedded within words than when alone. Study 2 further examined the correlates of single-character reading and two-character word reading for 142 Chinese third-year kindergarteners. Despite a high correlation between character reading and word reading, unique correlates emerged. Orthographic awareness, rapid automatized naming, and Pinyin letter-name knowledge independently explained variance in both character and word reading; however, orthographic awareness explained unique variance in character reading even after statistically controlling for word reading. Whereas orthographic and Pinyin knowledge may be more strongly associated with character recognition, other skills may be more important for learning to read words. Character and word reading may constitute slightly different processes, with somewhat different educational implications for each.

Pinyin Invented Spelling in Mandarin Chinese-Speaking Children With and Without Reading Difficulties

This study examined analytical pinyin (a phonological coding system for teaching pronunciation and lexical tones of Chinese characters) skills in 54 Mandarin-speaking fourth graders by using an invented spelling instrument that tapped into syllable awareness, phoneme awareness, lexical tones, and tone sandhi in Chinese. Pinyin invented spelling was significantly correlated with Chinese character recognition and Chinese phonological awareness (i.e., syllable deletion and phoneme deletion). In comparison to good and average readers, poor readers performed significantly worse on the invented spelling task, and a difference was also found between average and good readers. To differentiate readers at different levels, the pinyin invented spelling task, which examined both segmental and suprasegmental elements, was superior to the typical phonological awareness task, which examined segments only. Within this new task, items involving tone sandhi (Chinese language changes in which the tones of words alter according to predetermined rules) were more difficult to manipulate than were those without tone sandhi. The findings suggest that this newly developed task may be optimal for tapping unique phonological and linguistic features in reading of Chinese and examining particular tonal difficulties in struggling Chinese readers. In addition, the results suggest that phonics manipulations within tasks of phonological and tonal awareness can alter their difficulty levels.

Neural correlates of acoustic cues of English lexical stress in Cantonese-speaking children

The present study investigated the temporal course of neural discriminations of acoustic cues of English lexical stress (i.e., pitch, intensity and duration) in Cantonese-speaking children. We used an event-related potential (ERP) measure with a multiple-deviant oddball paradigm to record auditory mismatch responses to four deviants, namely, a change in pitch, intensity, or duration, or a change in all three acoustic dimensions, of English lexical stress in familiar words. In the time window of 170-270 ms, we found that the pitch deviant elicited significant positive mismatch responses (p-MMRs) and that the duration deviant elicited a mismatch negativity (MMN) response as compared with the standard. In the time window of 270-400 ms, the intensity deviant elicited a significant p-MMR, whereas both the duration and the three-dimension changed deviants elicited significant MMNs. These results suggest that Cantonese-speaking children are sensitive to either single or convergent acoustic cues of English words, and that the relative weighting of pitch, intensity and duration in stress processing may correlate with different ERP components at different time windows in Cantonese second graders.

Students’ Sense of Belonging at School in 41 Countries Cross-Cultural Variability

This study examined whether students’ sense of belonging at school (SOBAS) differed across attributes of countries, families, schools, teachers, or students. Multilevel analyses of survey and test data from 193,073 15-year-old students in 41 countries yielded four main findings. First, students in more egalitarian cultures often had higher SOBAS than those in more hierarchical cultures. Second, the teacher–student relationship had the strongest link with SOBAS and mediated the link between egalitarianism and SOBAS. Third, collectivism was not significantly linked to SOBAS. Finally, family characteristics (immigrant status, language spoken at home, socio-economic status [SES], books at home, family wealth, and family communication), schoolmates’ characteristics (SES and social communication), teacher characteristics (teacher–student relationship, teacher support and disciplinary climate), and student characteristics (reading achievement, self-efficacy, and self-concept) were also linked to students’ SOBAS and accounted for most of its variance. This ecological model shows how attributes at multiple levels are related to SOBAS.

Association of DCDC2 Polymorphisms with Normal Variations in Reading Abilities in a Chinese Population.

The doublecortin domain-containing 2 (DCDC2) gene, which is located on chromosome 6p22.1, has been widely suggested to be a candidate gene for dyslexia, but its role in typical reading development over time remains to be clarified. In the present study, we explored the role of DCDC2 in contributing to the individual differences in reading development from ages 6 to 11 years by analysing data from 284 unrelated children who were participating in the Chinese Longitudinal Study of Reading Development (CLSRD). The associations of eight single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in DCDC2 with the latent intercept and slope of children’s reading scores were examined in the first step. There was significant support for an association of rs807724 with the intercept for the reading comprehension measure of reading fluency, and the minor “G” allele was associated with poor reading performance. Next, we further tested the rs807724 SNP in association with the reading ability at each tested time and revealed that, in addition to significant associations with the two main reading measures (reading fluency and Chinese character reading) over multiple testing occasions, this SNP also showed associations with reading-related cognitive skills, including morphological production, orthographic judgment and phonological processing skills (rapid number naming, phoneme deletion, and tone detection). This study provides support for DCDC2 as a risk gene for reading disability and suggests that this gene is also operative for typical reading development in the Han population.

The role of SES in Chinese (L1) and English (L2) word reading in Chinese-speaking kindergarteners

The present study investigated the relationships between socioeconomic status (SES) and word reading in both Chinese (L1) and English (L2), with childrens cognitive/linguistic skills considered as mediators and/or moderators. One hundred ninety-nine Chinese kindergarteners in Hong Kong with diverse SES backgrounds participated in this study. SES explained unique variance in English word reading even after age, phonological processing, vocabulary and working memory were controlled. However, the effect of SES on Chinese word reading became nonsignificant when these control variables were included. Moreover, phonological awareness showed a full mediating effect on the relationship between SES and Chinese word reading. Both phonological awareness and vocabulary were found to partially mediate the association between SES and English word reading. These findings complement our understanding of the relation between SES and reading development in Chinese societies and may have policy or intervention development implications.

Beyond Copying A Comparison of Multi-Component Interventions on Chinese Early Literacy Skills

This study assessed the effects of three intervention programs for Chinese literacy development in kindergartners: the copying (Copy) program; a combined program of copying and Pinyin knowledge (Copy + Pinyin); and a combined program of copying and morphological awareness (Copy + MA). Ninety-seven kindergarteners aged 5–7 years in mainland China (30 in Copy, 32 in Copy + Pinyin, 35 in Copy + MA) participated. Thirty untrained children served as a control group. Children were tested on nonverbal IQ, morphological awareness, orthographic awareness, phonological awareness, invented Pinyin spelling, word reading and writing skills in Chinese. After an eight-week intervention period, children in all three intervention groups progressed significantly more than the control group on literacy skills. Furthermore, the combined program of copying and Pinyin knowledge yielded significantly greater improvement in invented Pinyin spelling than the Copy and control groups. Finally, the combined program of copying and morphological awareness yielded greater improvement in word reading and writing, as well as significantly higher orthographic awareness than other groups. These findings suggest the utility of multi-component interventions for early Chinese literacy learning. That the combined program particularly benefited children’s reading and writing skills at the beginning level suggests that both rote practice and analytic strategies should be emphasized in kindergartens and primary schools in order to produce greater improvements in Chinese literacy acquisition.