This study investigates the Chinese reading patterns of students with learning disabilities (LD). The performances of students with LD in reading the three categories of Chinese characters were particularly analysed: regular, irregular, and pseudo-characters. Fifty-three students with LD in reading and 44 students without LD of Year 4 were selected from five Hong Kong primary schools. Their abilities for reading Chinese characters were measured using Rasch analysis. Both types of students found regular characters as the easiest to read. Students without LD showed better performance in reading irregular characters than pseudo-characters, whereas students with LD exhibited no significant performance difference in reading these two categories. The implication of these results is that the students without LD might rely on using the orthographic processing than that of phonological processing to read. On the other hand, students with LD might not have the preference of using the orthographic processing.
[Copyright of Educational Psychology is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01443410.2013.785060]

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]