The development of Chinese word reading: Relations of sub-character processing, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and orthographic knowledge to Chinese-English biscriptal reading

The development of Chinese word reading: Relations of sub-character processing, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and orthographic knowledge to Chinese-English biscriptal reading

• Tong, Xiuli Dept. of Psychology, Chinese University of Hong Kong

2008

• A Human Growth & Development
  • AB Cognitive & Language Development, Perceptual & Intellectual Development
• G Curriculum, Teaching & Learning: Specific Disciplines
  • GA Chinese Language
    • GAD Teaching Methods of Reading Comprehension & Their Outcomes, Vocabulary Teaching
• G Curriculum, Teaching & Learning: Specific Disciplines
  • GB English Language
    • GBD Teaching Methods of Reading Comprehension & Their Outcomes, Vocabulary Teaching

Language Arts Linguistics Elementary Education Literacy Reading Instruction Cognitive Psychology

• Hong Kong

• 1997.7 onwards

• Pre-Primary Education
• Primary Education

This study examined the roles of sub-character processing, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and orthographic knowledge, measured using twelve different tasks hypothesized to indicate these four broad constructs, in Chinese character recognition and English word reading among 536 Hong Kong Chinese kindergartners, second- and fifth-graders. The twelve tasks generally showed an increase in performance with grade level. Confirmatory factor analyses comparing alternative models of these four constituents of Chinese word reading revealed a dynamic pattern of children's latent linguistic or reading processing skills development: The best-fitting model of kindergartners' processing was one that included two broad constructs, broadly termed metalinguistic processing and orthographic processing. In contrast, second-graders showed a fine-grained sensitivity to four distinct skills of sub-character processing, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and orthographic knowledge. Finally, the latent processing skills of the fifth-graders converged into phonological and orthographic processing. The contributions of each of these initially specified constructs, i.e., sub-character processing, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and orthographic knowledge, to Chinese word reading varied across each separate grade in regression analyses. The sub-character processing construct was uniquely associated with kindergarten Chinese word reading only. In contrast, the morphological awareness construct was uniquely associated with Chinese word reading in both second- and fifth-graders. The orthographic knowledge construct was uniquely associated with word reading across ail three grades. However, the phonological awareness construct was not uniquely associated with Chinese word reading in any of the groups of children, though it was uniquely associated with English word reading, even with Chinese character recognition skill statistically controlled. These findings demonstrate how Chinese word reading might develop across age and highlight the importance of sub-character processing, morphological awareness and orthographic knowledge for Chinese word reading development as well as the importance of phonological awareness for English word reading.

PhD

Chinese University of Hong Kong

Hong Kong

• English

Dissertation Theses

• 9781109225754

https://bibliography.lib.eduhk.hk/bibs/23a3a6b8

2010-11-29