Xiuhong Tong

Semantic and Plausibility Effects on Preview Benefit during Eye Fixations in Chinese Reading.

The boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) was used to examine whether high level information affects preview benefit during Chinese reading. In two experiments, readers read sentences with a 1-character target word while their eye movements were monitored. In Experiment 1, the semantic relatedness between the target word and the preview word was manipulated so that there were semantically related and unrelated preview words, both of which were not plausible in the sentence context. No significant differences between these two preview conditions were found, indicating no effect of semantic preview. In Experiment 2, we further examined semantic preview effects with plausible preview words. There were four types of previews: identical, related & plausible, unrelated & plausible, and unrelated & implausible. The results revealed a significant effect of plausibility as single fixation and gaze duration on the target region were shorter in the two plausible conditions than in the implausible condition. Moreover, there was some evidence for a semantic preview benefit as single fixation duration on the target region was shorter in the related & plausible condition than the unrelated & plausible condition. Implications of these results for processing of high level information during Chinese reading are discussed.

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.

Holistic versus Analytic Processing: Evidence for a Different Approach to Processing of Chinese at the Word and Character Levels in Chinese Children.

Among 30 Hong Kong Chinese fourth graders, sensitivities to character and word constructions were examined in judgment tasks at each level. There were three conditions across both tasks: the real condition, consisting of either actual two-character compound Chinese words or real Chinese compound characters; the reversed condition, with either the order of the two morphemes in the word or the order of the semantic and phonetic radicals in the character reversed; and the random condition, with either two morphemes randomly combined to create arbitrary nonwords or a semantic radical and a phonetic radical randomly combined using correct orthographic rules to create noncharacters. On the word level, children performed worst in the reversed condition and best with real words, whereas on the character level, children performed worst in the random condition and best in the reversed condition. Findings imply a holistic tendency toward word-level processing and an analytic approach to character-level processing in these Chinese children.

A Tale of Two Writing Systems: Double Dissociation and Metalinguistic Transfer Between Chinese and English Word Reading Among Hong Kong Children

This study investigated the rate of school-aged Chinese–English language learners at risk for reading difficulties in either Chinese or English only, or both, among second and fifth graders in Hong Kong. In addition, we examined the metalinguistic skills that distinguished those who were poor in reading Chinese from those who were poor in reading English. The prevalence of poor English readers among children identified to be poor in Chinese word recognition across the five participating schools was approximately 42% at Grade 2 and 57% at Grade 5. Across grades, children who were poor readers of both languages tended to have difficulties in phonological and morphological awareness. Poor readers of English only were found to manifest significantly poorer phonological awareness, compared to those who were poor readers of Chinese only; their average tone awareness score was also lower relative to normally developing controls. Apart from indicating possible dissociations between Chinese first language (L1) word reading and English second language (L2) word reading, these findings suggested that the degree to which different metalinguistic skills are important for reading in different writing systems may depend on the linguistic features of the particular writing system.

Discourse-Level Reading Comprehension in Chinese Children: What Is the Role of Syntactic Awareness?.

This study aimed to investigate the association between syntactic awareness and discourse-level reading comprehension in 136 Hong Kong Chinese children. These children, aged 11, from a longitudinal study, were administered a set of cognitive and linguistic measures. Partial correlational analyses showed that childrens performances in two syntactic tasks were significantly correlated with their discourse-level reading comprehension. A multiple hierarchical regression analysis indicated that syntactic skills, especially the conjunction cloze task, accounted for unique variance in reading comprehension even when age, nonverbal IQ, phonological awareness, morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge, as well as the auto-regressive effect of previous reading comprehension skill were statistically controlled in this study. Findings suggest that syntactic awareness is uniquely associated with discourse-level reading comprehension in Hong Kong fifth graders.

Evidence for a deficit in orthographic structure processing in Chinese developmental dyslexia: An event-related potential study

The present event-related potential (ERP) study aimed to examine group differences in processing of orthographic information in Chinese children with dyslexia and typically developing children. Twelve dyslexic (ages 100-125 months) and 11 control (ages 104-124 months) children were given a character decision task (similar to a lexical decision task). For the control group, the radical position information influenced the character processing at a later stage of semantic information processing as reflected by a more negative N400 component in the pseudocharacter condition, in which the semantic and phonetic radical were combined following correct orthographic rules, as compared to the noncharacter condition, in which the structure of the semantic and phonetic radicals was reversed from that for each real character. In contrast, the dyslexic group showed no such differences across the experimental conditions for the N400 component. Results suggest that Chinese children with dyslexia may have a deficit in processing orthographic information (specifically, radical position). Furthermore, a late positive component (LPC) was elicited in both groups, suggesting that children may have to back track on their earlier semantic memory in order to make a final decision as to whether the character is real or not.

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.

Tune in to the Tone: Lexical Tone Identification is Associated with Vocabulary and Word Recognition Abilities in Young Chinese Children.

Lexical tone is one of the most prominent features in the phonological representation of words in Chinese. However, little, if any, research to date has directly evaluated how young Chinese children’s lexical tone identification skills contribute to vocabulary acquisition and character recognition. The present study distinguished lexical tones from segmental phonological awareness and morphological awareness in order to estimate the unique contribution of lexical tone in early vocabulary acquisition and character recognition. A sample of 199 Cantonese children aged 5–6 years was assessed on measures of lexical tone identification, segmental phonological awareness, morphological awareness, nonverbal ability, vocabulary knowledge, and Chinese character recognition. It was found that lexical tone awareness and morphological awareness were both associated with vocabulary knowledge and character recognition. However, there was a significant relationship between lexical tone awareness and both vocabulary knowledge and character recognition, even after controlling for the effects of age, nonverbal ability, segmental phonological awareness and morphological awareness. These findings suggest that lexical tone is a key factor accounting for individual variance in young children’s lexical acquisition in Chinese, and that lexical tone should be considered in understanding how children learn new Chinese vocabulary words, in either oral or written forms.

Beyond auditory sensory processing deficits: Lexical tone perception deficits in Chinese children with developmental dyslexia

Increasing evidence suggests that children with developmental dyslexia exhibit a deficit not only at the segmental level of phonological processing but also, by extension, at the suprasegmental level. However, it remains unclear whether such a suprasegmental phonological processing deficit is due to a difficulty in processing acoustic cues of speech rhythm, such as rise time and intensity. This study set out to investigate to what extent suprasegmental phonological processing (i.e., Cantonese lexical tone perception) and rise time sensitivity could distinguish Chinese children with dyslexia from typically developing children. Sixteen children with dyslexia and 44 age-matched controls were administered a Cantonese lexical tone perception task, psychoacoustic tasks, a nonverbal reasoning ability task, and word reading and dictation tasks. Children with dyslexia performed worse than controls on Cantonese lexical tone perception, rise time, and intensity. Furthermore, Cantonese lexical tone perception appeared to be a stable indicator that distinguishes children with dyslexia from controls, even after controlling for basic auditory processing skills. These findings suggest that suprasegmental phonological processing (i.e., lexical tone perception) is a potential factor that accounts for reading difficulty in Chinese.

Two-Character Chinese Compound Word Processing in Chinese Children With and Without Dyslexia: ERP Evidence

Using event-related potential (ERP) measures, we examined the time course of Chinese compound word processing in 15 dyslexic and 10 normal children in a lexical decision task with three conditions including real words (e.g., (house)), reversed nonwords (e.g., can be transposed to a real word (ocean)) and random nonwords (e.g., is not a real word when transposing). Behavioral results showed that dyslexic children performed slower and less accurately than normal children did across conditions. ERP data revealed that normal children exhibited significant N400 effects across conditions. The dyslexics did not show any difference on N400, however, suggesting a possible weakness of morphological processing in dyslexic children.