Chinese children's statistical learning of orthographic regularities: Positional constraints and character structure

Chinese children's statistical learning of orthographic regularities: Positional constraints and character structure

• Tong, Xiuli Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong
• McBride, Catherine Chinese University of Hong Kong

Scientific Studies of Reading, 18(4), 291-308, 2014

Routledge

2014

• G Curriculum, Teaching & Learning: Specific Disciplines
  • GA Chinese Language
    • GAD Teaching Methods of Reading Comprehension & Their Outcomes, Vocabulary Teaching

• Hong Kong

• 1997.7 onwards

• Pre-Primary Education
• Primary Education

This study examined how Chinese children acquire the untaught positional constraints of stroke patterns that are embedded in left-right structured and top-bottom structured characters. Using an orthographic regularity pattern elicitation paradigm, 536 Hong Kong Chinese children at different levels of reading (kindergarten, 2nd, and 5th grades) were asked to produce invented characters with left-right and top-bottom stroke pattern pairs. Even kindergartners were aware of the positional constraints of stroke patterns and were able to produce orthographically legal pseudocharacters with different stroke pattern pairs. This ability improved across grade level. Moreover, there was a production asymmetry in which children produced more top-bottom structured pseudocharacters than left-right structured pseudocharacters. The error pattern analysis further revealed that more positional errors were observed in producing left-right structured noncharacters than in the top-bottom structured noncharacters. This production asymmetry seemed to reflect children's experience with a distribution asymmetry observed between left-right (59.19%) and top-bottom structured characters (23.46%) in a corpus of school Chinese. These results are discussed within the framework of statistical learning of orthographic regularity in Chinese.
[Copyright of Scientific Studies of Reading is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2014.884098]

• English

Journal Articles

• 10888438

• 10.1080/10888438.2014.884098

https://bibliography.lib.eduhk.hk/bibs/ea8bcd06

2014-10-22