Kevin K. H. Chung

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.

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.

Prevalence, gender ratio and gender differences in reading‐related cognitive abilities among Chinese children with dyslexia in Hong Kong

Based on the data of the normative study of the Hong Kong test of specific learning difficulties in reading and writing, and the Test of visual‐perceptual skills (non‐motor)—Revised, 99 children aged between 6 and 10½ years were identified as children with dyslexia out of the normative sample of 690 children. By excluding 12 children known to score below average in IQ, 87 children, including 20 children not tested for IQ, could be regarded as children with dyslexia, yielding a prevalence rate of 12.6% and a boy:girl gender ratio of 1.6 to 1. The figures would become 9.7% and 2.0 to 1 if the 20 children were omitted from computation. However, gender imbalance could not be readily explained by gender differences in reading‐related cognitive abilities, as there were only minor and subtle differences. Regression analyses to evaluate the relative contribution of different cognitive abilities to reading and writing suggested that orthographic knowledge and naming speed were most important among children with dyslexia. Implications of the findings and the need for early intervention are discussed.

Second Language Learning Difficulties in Chinese Children With Dyslexia: What Are the Reading-Related Cognitive Skills That Contribute to English and Chinese Word Reading?

This study examined the relations between reading-related cognitive skills and word reading development of Chinese children with dyslexia in their Chinese language (L1) and in English (L2). A total of 84 bilingual children—28 with dyslexia, 28 chronological age (CA) controls, and 28 reading-level (RL) controls—participated and were administered measures of word reading, rapid naming, visual-orthographic skills, and phonological and morphological awareness in both L1 and L2. Children with dyslexia showed weaker performance than CA controls in both languages and had more difficulties in phonological awareness in English but not in Chinese. In addition, reading-related cognitive skills in Chinese contributed significantly to the ability to read English words, suggesting cross-linguistic transfer from L1 to L2. Results found evidence for different phonological units of awareness related to the characteristics of the different languages being learned, supporting the psycholinguistic grain size and linguistic coding differences hypotheses.

Cognitive profiles of chinese adolescents with dyslexia

The present study sought to identify cognitive abilities that might distinguish Hong Kong Chinese adolescents with and without dyslexia and examined the cognitive profile of dyslexic adolescents in order to better understand this important problem. The performance of 27 Chinese adolescents with childhood diagnoses of dyslexia was compared with 27 adolescents of the same chronological age (CA) and 27 of matched reading level (RL) on measures of literacy and cognitive abilities: Chinese word reading, one-minute reading, reading comprehension, dictation, verbal short-term memory, rapid naming, visual-orthographic knowledge, morphological and phonological awareness. The results indicated that the dyslexic group scored lower than the CA group, but similar to the RL group, especially in the areas of rapid naming, visual-orthographic knowledge and morphological awareness, with over half having multiple deficits exhibited 2 or more cognitive areas. Furthermore, the number of cognitive deficits was associated with the degree of reading and spelling impairment. These findings suggest that adolescents with childhood diagnoses of dyslexia have persistent literacy difficulties and seem to have multiple causes for reading difficulties in Chinese.

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.

Copying skills in relation to word reading and writing in Chinese children with and without dyslexia.

Because Chinese character learning typically relies heavily on rote character copying, we tested independent copying skill in third- and fourth-grade Chinese children with and without dyslexia. In total, 21 Chinese third and fourth graders with dyslexia and 33 without dyslexia (matched on age, nonverbal IQ, and mothers education level) were given tasks of copying unfamiliar print in Vietnamese, Korean, and Hebrew as well as tests of word reading and writing, morphological awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and orthographic processing. All three copying tasks distinguished dyslexic children from nondyslexic children with moderate effect sizes (.67-.80). Zero-order correlations of the three copying tasks with dictation and reading ranged from .37 to .58. With age, Ravens, group status, RAN, morphological awareness, and orthographic measures statistically controlled, the copying tasks uniquely explained 6% and 3% variance in word reading and dictation, respectively. Results suggest that copying skill itself may be useful in understanding the development and impairment of literacy skills in Chinese.

Longitudinal predictors of Chinese word reading and spelling among elementary grade students.

The longitudinal predictive power of four important reading-related skills (phonological skills, rapid naming, orthographic skills, and morphological awareness) to Chinese word reading and writing to dictation (i.e., spelling) was examined in a 3-year longitudinal study among 251 Chinese elementary students. Rapid naming, orthographic skills, and morphological awareness assessed in Grade 1 were significant longitudinal predictors of Chinese word reading in Grades 1 to 4. As for word spelling, rapid naming was the only significant predictor across grades. Morphological awareness was a robust predictor of word spelling in Grade 1 only. Phonological skills and orthographic skills significantly predicted word spelling in Grades 2 and 4. After controlling for autoregressive effects, morphological awareness and orthographic skills were the significant longitudinal predictors of Chinese word reading and word spelling, respectively. These findings reflected the impacts of the Chinese orthography on childrens reading and spelling development.

Contribution of discourse and morphosyntax skills to reading comprehension in Chinese dyslexic and typically developing children

This study aimed at identifying important skills for reading comprehension in Chinese dyslexic children and their typically developing counterparts matched on age (CA controls) or reading level (RL controls). The children were assessed on Chinese reading comprehension, cognitive, and reading-related skills. Results showed that the dyslexic children performed significantly less well than the CA controls but similarly to RL controls in most measures. Results of multiple regression analyses showed that word-level reading-related skills like oral vocabulary and word semantics were found to be strong predictors of reading comprehension among typically developing junior graders and dyslexic readers of senior grades, whereas morphosyntax, a text-level skill, was most predictive for typically developing senior graders. It was concluded that discourse and morphosyntax skills are particularly important for reading comprehension in the non-inflectional and topic-prominent Chinese system.

Effects of cognitive‐based instruction on mathematical problem solving by learners with mild intellectual disabilities

Abstract Background This study examined the effects of different approaches to teaching learners with mild intellectual disabilities to solve mathematical word problems. Method Thirty Chinese students with mild intellectual disabilities from a special school in Hong Kong were taught using conventional instruction, worked example instruction, and cognitive strategy instruction. A cross‐subjects experimental design was used to compare the effects of the three instructional approaches on immediate and delayed tests. Results Students presented with worked example and cognitive strategy instruction solved more problems correctly and generally outperformed students presented with conventional instruction in both immediate and delayed tests. In addition, learners receiving worked example and cognitive strategy instruction were more able to maintain and generalise their previous knowledge and skills to solve novel problems than those receiving conventional instruction. Conclusions The findings indicate that learners can profit from worked example and cognitive strategy instruction which can promote problem‐solving skills and mathematical learning.