Connie Suk-Han Ho

Phonological skills are important in learning to read Chinese.

A 4-year longitudinal study was conducted to examine the relationship between Chinese childrens phonological skills and their success in reading. Initially, 100 Hong Kong Chinese children were tested on visual and phonological skills at the age of 3, before they could read. The findings showed that prereading phonological skills significantly predicted the childrens reading performance in Chinese 2 and 3 years later, even after controlling for the effects of age, IQ, and mothers education. The main reason for this relationship is that phonological knowledge helps children to use the phonetic component in Chinese characters.

Cognitive profiling and preliminary subtyping in Chinese developmental dyslexia

The present study examined the cognitive profile and subtypes of developmental dyslexia in a nonalphabetic script, Chinese. One hundred and forty-seven Chinese primary school children with developmental dyslexia were tested on a number of literacy and cognitive tasks. The results showed that rapid naming deficit and orthographic deficit were the two most dominant types of cognitive deficits in Chinese developmental dyslexia, and that rapid naming and orthographic processing had significant unique contributions to literacy performance. Seven subtypes of dyslexia--global deficit, orthographic deficit, phonological memory deficit, mild difficulty, and three other subtypes with rapid-naming-related deficits--were identified using scores of the cognitive tasks as classification measures in cluster analyses. These subtypes were validated with a behaviour checklist and three literacy measures. The authors suggested that orthographic and rapid naming deficits in Chinese dyslexic children might pose an interrelated problem in developing orthographic knowledge and representation. Therefore, orthographic-related difficulties may be the crux of the problem in Chinese developmental dyslexia.

Developmental issues in Chinese children's character acquisition.

Measures of phonological processing, speech perception, and Chinese character recognition were administered to 109 Hong Kong Chinese 3- and 4-year-olds. A model predicting phonological awareness from vocabulary, verbal short-term memory, and speech perception was supported. Both phonological awareness and letter naming predicted unique variance in character recognition after controlling for other phonological processing and vocabulary skills, similar to previous studies of Western readers.

Predictors of Beginning Reading in Chinese and English: A 2-Year Longitudinal Study of Chinese Kindergartners

Ninety Chinese children were tested once at age 4 and again 22 months later on phonological-processing and other reading skills. Chinese phonological-processing skills alone modestly predicted Chinese character recognition, and English letter-name knowledge uniquely predicted reading of both Chinese and English 2 years later. Furthermore, concurrently measured phonological-processing skills in Chinese, but not English, accounted for unique variance in both English and Chinese word recognition. English invented spelling was strongly associated with reading in English only, and orthographic knowledge significantly accounted for unique variance in Chinese reading only. Results suggest both universal and specific characteristics of the development of English word and Chinese character recognition among young native Chinese speakers learning to read English as a second language.

A "Radical" Approach to Reading Development in Chinese: The Role of Semantic Radicals and Phonetic Radicals

Two studies investigating the significance of radical knowledge in Chinese reading development are reported in this paper. Study 1 examined the semantic radical knowledge of 20 Grade 1, 20 Grade 3, and 20 Grade 5 Chinese children in Hong Kong. It was found that various types of semantic radical knowledge, including the position and semantic category of semantic radicals, correlated significantly with Chinese word reading and sentence comprehension. Study 2 examined phonetic radical knowledge with another three groups of 20 Chinese children in Grades 1, 3, and 5 respectively. It was found that various measures of phonetic radical knowledge, including the function and sound value of phonetic radicals, correlated significantly with Chinese word reading. These studies found that, developmentally, the children started acquiring the knowledge of character structure, position, semantic category, and sound value of radicals from about Grade 1. However, they did not understand that the function of semantic radicals is to provide meaning cues in reading until Grade 3. The authors concluded that the radical is an important orthographic processing unit in reading development in Chinese.

Naming-speed deficits and phonological memory deficits in Chinese developmental dyslexia

Abstract The naming-speed deficit hypothesis in developmental dyslexia was examined with readers in a nonalphabetic script, Chinese. Twenty Chinese dyslexic children in Hong Kong were compared with 20 average readers of the same age (CA controls) and 20 average readers of the same reading level (RL controls) in naming speed (naming digits, colours, pictures, and Chinese characters) and phonological memory skills (digit repetition, word repetition, and nonword repetition). The results showed that the naming speed of Chinese dyslexic children was significantly slower than that of their CA controls in all the naming tasks, but similar to that of their RL controls. The dyslexic children also performed significantly worse than both CA and RL controls in all the phonological memory tasks. These findings suggest that Chinese dyslexic children have naming-speed deficits and phonological memory deficits like their alphabetic counterparts.

The phonological deficit hypothesis in Chinese developmental dyslexia

The phonological deficit hypothesis in developmental dyslexia wasexamined with readers in Chinese, a nonalphabetic script. Fifty-sixChinese children with dyslexia (23 of whom had reading and writingdifficulties and 33 had reading problems only) were compared withaverage readers of the same age (CA controls) and average readers of thesame reading-level (RL controls) in phonological awareness andphonological memory skills. The results showed that the Chinese dyslexicchildren with both reading and writing difficulties performedsignificantly worse than their CA controls and RL controls in nearly allthe phonological tasks, whereas those with reading problems only,performed significantly less well than their CA controls, but similarlywith their RL controls. These findings suggest that Chinese childrenwith dyslexia have deficits in processing phonological information liketheir alphabetic counterparts.

Development of Phonological Awareness of Chinese Children in Hong Kong

Three studies were conducted in Hong Kong to examine the development of phonological awareness of Chinese children from the ages of 3 to 8. Like English-speaking children, Chinese children were found to be able to detect relatively large sound segments (e.g., partial homophones) at the beginning and gradually progress to smaller sound segments (e.g., rhymes and tones). Tasks detecting onsets and rhymes in a “similarity format” were found to be easier for Chinese children than those in an “oddity format.” In addition, cross-linguistic comparisons indicated that Chinese children develop an awareness of initial consonants and rhymes later than their English counterparts. The possible impact from differences in the oral and written languages between Chinese and English are also discussed.

The use of orthographic analogies in learning to read Chinese

Two studies, comprising training in phonological analogy and semantic analogy with pre-and post-training assessments, were conducted to investigate whether young children made orthographic analogies in learning to read a nonalphabetic script, Chinese, as alphabetic readers do. Twenty Chinese first-graders and 20 third-graders participated in each of the studies. The results showed that not only the third-graders, but also the first-graders made phonological analogies by the phonetic (i.e. the orthographic component in a Chinese character that provides sound cues) and semantic analogies by the radical (i.e. the orthographic component that provides meaning cues). It was, therefore, suggested that the roles and functions of the phonetics and radicals could be taught explicitly in school from an early age to help improve childrens reading skills.

Reading and Spelling Chinese among Beginning Readers: What Skills Make a Difference?.

The contributions of six important reading-related skills (phonological awareness, rapid naming, orthographic skills, morphological awareness, listening comprehension, and syntactic skills) to Chinese word and text reading were examined among 290 Chinese first graders in Hong Kong. Rapid naming, but not phonological awareness, was a significant predictor of Chinese word reading and writing to dictation (i.e., spelling) in the context of orthographic skills and morphological awareness. Commonality analyses suggested that orthographic skills and morphological awareness each contributed significant amount of unique variance to Chinese word reading and spelling. Syntactic skills accounted for significant amount of unique variance in reading comprehension at both sentence and passage levels after controlling for the effects of word reading and the other skills, but listening comprehension did not. A model on the interrelationships among the reading-related skills and Chinese reading at both word and text levels was proposed.