Background: This study sought to identify cognitive abilities that might distinguish Hong Kong Chinese kindergarten children at risk for dyslexia through either language delay or familial history of dyslexia from children who were not at risk and to examine how these abilities were associated with Chinese word recognition. The cognitive skills of interest were syllable awareness, tone detection, rapid automatised naming, visual skill, and morphological awareness. Method: We recruited 36 children whose sibling had been previously diagnosed with dyslexia (familial risk group) and 36 children who were initially reported to have difficulties in preschool literacy acquisition by either teachers or parents and subsequently found to demonstrate clinical at-risk factors in aspects of language by paediatricians (language delayed group); the mean age of these groups was approximately 61 months. Thirty-six children with no such risk factors were matched by age, IQ, and parents' education to the at-risk groups. All children were tested on cognitive skills and Chinese word recognition. Results: Compared to the controls, children in the language delayed group scored significantly lower on all measures, whereas children in the familial risk group performed significantly worse only on tone detection, morphological awareness, and Chinese word recognition. In regression analyses, word recognition was best explained by morphological awareness, tone detection and visual skill. Conclusions: Languagerelated measures are strongly associated with early reading development and impairment in Hong Kong Chinese children. Tests of tone detection and morphological awareness may be important clinical tools for diagnosing risk for reading problems in young Chinese children. In contrast, Chinese language delay may be associated with broader cognitive impairments as found previously in various Indo-European languages (e

Both early language delay and familial risk strongly overlap with subsequent dyslexia in Chinese children. Overall, rapid automatized naming and morphological awareness are relatively strong correlates of developmental dyslexia in Chinese; visual skill and phonological awareness may also be uniquely associated with subsequent literacy development in at-risk and typically developing children, respectively.

This paper advances the argument that in learning to read/spell Chinese characters and words, it is important for learners to understand the role of the component parts. These constituents consist of phonetic and semantic radicals, or bujians, made up of clusters of strokes in their proper sequence. Beginning readers/spellers need to be sensitive to the positional hierarchy and internal structure of these constituent parts. Those Chinese children diagnosed with developmental dyslexia tend to have more difficulties in spelling Chinese characters and in writing to dictation than in reading. A lexical decision study with two groups of tertiary students differing in their Chinese language ability was carried out to test their efficiency in processing real and pseudo characters as a function of printed frequency of the characters, and the consistency of their component semantic radicals. There is some evidence that even for adult readers differing in their Chinese language ability, lexicality, frequency of characters and the consistency of the semantic radicals affect accurate and rapid character identification. Suggestions for research and teaching approaches are made to enhance the analysis and synthesis of the phonetic and semantic radicals to promote efficient reading and spelling in Chinese.

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This study sought to examine factors that are predictive of future developmental dyslexia among a group of 5-year-old Chinese children at risk for dyslexia, including 62 children with a sibling who had been previously diagnosed with dyslexia and 52 children who manifested clinical at-risk factors in aspects of language according to testing by paediatricians. The age-5 performances on various literacy and cognitive tasks, gender and group status (familial risk or language delayed) were used to predict developmental dyslexia 2 years later using logistic regression analysis. Results showed that greater risk of dyslexia was related to slower rapid automatized naming, lower scores on morphological awareness, Chinese character recognition and English letter naming, and gender (boys had more risk). Three logistic equations were generated for estimating individual risk of dyslexia. The strongest models were those that included all print-related variables (including speeded number naming, character recognition and letter identification) and gender, with about 70% accuracy or above. Early identification of those Chinese children at risk for dyslexia can facilitate better dyslexia risk management.