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Tasks representing 9 cognitive constructs of potential importance to understanding Chinese reading development and impairment were administered to 75 children with dyslexia and 77 age-matched children without reading difficulties in 5th and 6th grade. Logistic regression analyses revealed that dyslexic readers were best distinguished from age-matched controls with tasks of morphological awareness, speeded number naming, and vocabulary skill; performance on tasks of visual skills or phonological awareness failed to distinguish the groups. Path analyses further revealed that a construct of morphological awareness was the strongest consistent predictor of a variety of literacy-related skills across both groups. Findings suggest that morphological awareness may be a core theoretical construct necessary for explaining variability in reading Chinese.

This study presents a model of harsh parenting that has an indirect effect, as well as a direct effect, on child aggression in the school environment through the mediating process of child emotion regulation. Tested on a sample of 325 Chinese children and their parents, the model showed adequate goodness of fit. Also investigated were interaction effects between parents' and children's gender. Mothers' harsh parenting affected child emotion regulation more strongly than fathers', whereas harsh parenting emanating from fathers had a stronger effect on child aggression. Fathers' harsh parenting also affected sons more than daughters, whereas there was no gender differential effect with mothers' harsh parenting. These results are discussed with an emphasis on negative emotionality as a potentially common cause of family perturbations, including parenting and child adjustment problems.

Two unique measures of morphological awareness, along with other reading-related tasks, were orally administered to 100 kindergarten and 100 2nd-grade Hong Kong Chinese children. These morphological awareness tasks were developed on the basis of 2 special properties of Chinese: (a) the relatively large number of homophones requires speakers to distinguish unique meanings in syllables with identical sounds, and (b) complex vocabulary words are often built from 2 or more previously learned morphemes. Both tasks of morphological awareness predicted unique variance in Chinese character recognition in these children, after controlling for age, phonological awareness, speeded naming, speed of processing, and vocabulary. Developmentally, both tasks of morphological awareness improved with age. Results demonstrate that morphological awareness is uniquely important for early Chinese character recognition.

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Two studies explored the nature of phonological awareness (PA) in Chinese. In Study 1, involving 146 children, awareness of phoneme onset did not differ from chance levels at ages 3-5 years in preschool but increased to 70% correct in first grade, when children first received phonological coding (Pinyin) instruction. Similarly, tone awareness was at better than chance levels from second year kindergarten (age 4), but increased strongly and significantly in first grade to 74% accuracy. In contrast, syllable and rime awareness increased gradually and steadily across ages 3-6 years. Patterns suggest different influences of age and literacy instruction for different PA levels. In Study 2, involving 202 preschoolers, variance in Chinese character recognition was best explained by tasks of syllable awareness, tone awareness, and speeded naming. Findings underscore the unique importance of both tone and syllable for early character acquisition in Chinese children.