Him Cheung

The development of phonological awareness: effects of spoken language experience and orthography

Phonological awareness, the ability to analyze spoken language into small sound units, has been shown to be affected by the individuals early orthographic experience (alphabetic vs. non-alphabetic). Past studies, however, have not differentiated the effect of script alphabeticity from that of spoken language experience, which covaries strongly with the phonological properties of the language. The present study compares younger, pre-reading to older, literate children from different linguistic backgrounds on their phonological awareness. Hong Kong and Guangzhou subjects both spoke Cantonese. The latter subjects had early experience with Pinyin (alphabetic) in addition to their logographic Chinese reading; the former read only logographic Chinese. New Zealand subjects spoke English and read the Roman alphabet. Results showed that: (1) the Hong Kong and Guangzhou pre-readers performed very similarly at all levels of phonological awareness; (2) the New Zealand pre-readers outperformed their Hong Kong and Guangzhou counterparts on onset, rime, and coda analyses; (3) the Guangzhou reading children outperformed their Hong Kong counterparts on onset and coda analyses. Whereas finding (3) reflects an effect of alphabeticity in the first learned script, finding (2) in combination with finding (1) indicates an effect of early spoken language experience independent of orthography. The fact that orthographic and spoken language experience both impact on the development of phonological skills implies a mediating function of phonological awareness in integrating sound information derived from reading and perceiving speech.

The Role of Visual and Auditory Temporal Processing for Chinese Children with Developmental Dyslexia.

This study examined temporal processing in relation to Chinese reading acquisition and impairment. The performances of 26 Chinese primary school children with developmental dyslexia on tasks of visual and auditory temporal order judgement, rapid naming, visual-orthographic knowledge, morphological, and phonological awareness were compared with those of 26 reading level ability controls (RL) and 26 chronological age controls (CA). Dyslexic children performed worse than the CA group but similar to the RL group on measures of accurate processing of auditory and visual-order stimuli, rapid naming, morphological awareness, and phonological awareness and a minority performed worse on the two temporal processing tasks. However, hierarchical regression analyses revealed that visual but not auditory temporal processing contributed unique variance to Chinese character recognition even with other cognitive measures controlled, suggesting it may be as important a correlate of reading ability in Chinese as in alphabetic scripts.

Perception of tone and aspiration contrasts in Chinese children with dyslexia

BACKGROUND Previous research has shown a relationship between speech perception and dyslexia in alphabetic writing. In these studies speech perception was measured using phonemes, a prominent feature of alphabetic languages. Given the primary importance of lexical tone in Chinese language processing, we tested the extent to which lexical tone and aspiration, two fundamental dimensions of Cantonese speech not represented in writing, would distinguish dyslexic from non-dyslexic 8-year-old Chinese children. Tone and aspiration were tested in addition to other phonological processing skills across groups to determine the importance of different aspects of phonological sensitivity in relation to reading disability. METHODS Dyslexic children and age-matched and reading-level controls were tested on their categorical perception of minimal pairs contrasting in tone and aspiration, phonological awareness, rapid digit naming, and Chinese reading abilities. RESULTS While performing similarly to reading-level controls, dyslexic children perceived tone and aspiration contrasts less categorically and accurately than age-matched controls. They also performed more poorly than the age-matched controls on rapid digit naming and a measure of phonological awareness testing childrens sensitivity to different grain size units. CONCLUSIONS Dyslexia in non-alphabetic Chinese correlates with the categorical organization and accuracy of Cantonese speech perception, along the tone and aspiration dimensions. This association with reading is mediated by its association with phonological awareness. Therefore, dyslexia is universally at least partly a function of basic speech and phonological processes independent of whether the speech dimensions in question are coded in writing.

Improving Phonological Awareness and Word Reading in a Later Learned Alphabetic Script.

This study examines the effects of phonological skill training on consonantal phoneme deletion and word reading performance in two groups of adolescent Chinese readers who were also literate in English. The research questions were: (1) whether training would promote segmentation skills over and above years of contact with the alphabetic (English) writing system, given an initial logographic (Chinese) reading background; (2) whether improvements in segmentation skills due to training would enhance word reading in the alphabetic script. The participants were trained on phoneme counting, phoneme blending and rime judgement with English materials over a period of two months. Resultant changes in consonantal phoneme deletion and English word reading performance were examined. Significant improvements in both activities due to training were observed for the younger (mean age 12.7 years) but not the older (mean age 15.8 years) participants. Follow-up analyses showed that language proficiency might be the factor underlying this age effect. Individual differences in phoneme deletion uniquely predicted word reading for both age groups, although the relationship tended to be stronger for the less proficient than the more proficient members. These findings suggest that beyond years of normal reading instruction in the alphabetic system, specialized segmentation training could still contribute to promoting consonantal phonemic analysis that is not supported by the logographic first-learned script. Moreover, improved phonological skills do lead to better word reading in the later-learned writing system. Implications of the present findings for second script reading instruction are considered.

Early orthographic experience modifies both phonological awareness and on-line speech processing

Previous authors have shown that orthographic experience modifies phonological awareness, yet whether it also impacts on automatic speech processing has not been explored. In the present study, we replicated the effect of early orthographic experience on phonological awareness, and further demonstrated that on-line speech processing varied between readers coming from different literacy backgrounds. We measured phonological awareness and on-line speech processing by a sound matching and a primed shadowing task, respectively. Participants were Cantonese-Chinese speakers who had learned only logographic characters for their Chinese reading, and those who had learned both characters and alphabetic Pinyin. We found evidence of phoneme-level analysis in both sound matching and primed shadowing only in the latter group. This finding suggests an active role of orthographic experience in shaping phonological awareness and the representation subserving day-to-day speech communication.

Adult age differences in the on-line processing of new concepts in discourse

Abstract Young university students and elderly community-dwelling volunteers read three short narratives word by word on a video display terminal, pacing the text by pressing a key. With this “moving window” method, reading times for each word were measured. Subjects recalled each narrative immediately after reading. Regression analyses were used to predict word-by-word reading times from text features representing different levels of discourse processing (e.g., word length and frequency, serial position, new concepts introduced, and the presence of syntactic boundaries). the effects of these features on reading time were examined not only for young and old as a whole, but also for good and poor recallers within each age group. For many of these features, younger and older readers responded similarly to the demands of the text in allocating reading time. Interesting differences among these different kinds of readers revolved around how they allocated time to encode and organize new concepts. Overall, olde...

Recall and articulation of English and Chinese words by Chinese-English bilinguals

Three groups of subjects were tested to investigate the effect of language on the relationship between recall span and articulation rate. Native English-speaking monolinguals and native Chinese-speaking monolinguals recalled only English or Chinese words, respectively. Chinese-English bilinguals recalled both English and Chinese words. Articulation rates for English and Chinese monolinguals and Chinese-English bilinguals in each language were also obtained. When recall span was regressed on articulation rate, the slopes for Chinese and English words were significantly different for the Chinese-English bilinguals. This difference was not due to language proficiency but to phonological differences between English and Chinese.

Lexical and conceptual processing in Chinese-English bilinguals: further evidence for asymmetry.

According to the asymmetry model of bilingual representation (Kroll & Stewart, 1994), the first language (L1) lexicon is closely tied to an underlying conceptual memory, whereas second language (L2) items are mostly associated with their L1 equivalents. An outcome of this architecture is that L1-to-L2, or forward, translation must be mediated by the conceptual memory, whereas L2-to-L1 (backward) translation takes a direct lexical path. Some predictions derived from this hypothetical structure were tested in the present study, which took into account, through analysis of covariance, variations in response production time, concept retrieval time, and some other characteristics associated with the individual test items. Proficient Chinese-English bilinguals were tested on delayed production (Balota & Chumbley, 1985), picture naming, word translation, and category matching. The expected asymmetrical pattern of translation latencies (i.e., forward > backward) was demonstrated, although it could be statistically explained by the item characteristic of familiarity; matching an L1 item to a category name was faster than matching an L2 item, suggesting relatively strong L1 conceptual links. The present results are best accommodated by a form of asymmetry that allows for nondominant L2-concept linkage, the use of which is conditional upon the familiarity of the test item to the bilingual.

Early Difficulties of Chinese Preschoolers at Familial Risk for Dyslexia: Deficits in Oral Language, Phonological Processing Skills, and Print-Related Skills.

The present study examined some early performance difficulties of Chinese preschoolers at familial risk for dyslexia. Seventy-six high-risk (40 good and 36 poor readers) and 25 low-risk Chinese children were tested on oral language, reading-related cognitive skills (e.g. phonological processing skills, rapid naming, and morphological awareness), and Chinese word reading and spelling over a 3-year period. The parents were also given a behaviour checklist for identifying child at-risk behaviours. Results showed that the High Risk (Poor Reading) group performed significantly worse than the Low Risk and the High Risk (Good Reading) group on most of the measures and domains. More children in the High Risk (Poor Reading) group displayed at-risk behaviours than in the other two groups. These results suggest that Chinese at-risk children with early difficulties in reading and spelling do show a wide range of language-, phonology-, and print-related deficits, similar to their alphabetic counterparts. An understanding of these early difficulties may help prevent dyslexia from developing in at-risk children.

Processing the Chinese language: An introduction

The Chinese language possesses linguistic properties that are distinct from those of the most widely studied European languages. Given such uniqueness, research on the neurocognitive processing of Chinese not only contributes to our understanding of language-specific cognitive processes but also sheds light on the universality of psycholinguistic models developed on the basis of these European languages. In this Introduction, we briefly review neurocognitive studies on the processing of Chinese in the past ten years, summarizing existing findings concerning lexical, sentential, and discourse processing in Chinese.