Findings suggest that the combination of phonological awareness, rapid naming and morphological awareness are essential in the early prediction of later reading difficulties in Chinese children.

Among 262 Chinese children, syllable awareness and rapid automatized naming (RAN) at age 5 years and invented spelling of Pinyin at age 6 years independently predicted subsequent Chinese character recognition and English word reading at ages 8 years and 10 years, even with initial Chinese character reading ability statistically controlled. In addition, reading fluency in Chinese was predicted by RAN but not by phonological sensitivity, whereas Chinese dictation was uniquely predicted by phonological sensitivity but not by RAN. Finally, vocabulary knowledge emerged as a unique developmental predictor of all Chinese literacy skills tested. Findings underscore the importance of both early phonological awareness and RAN for literacy development in Chinese as a first language and English as a second language over time and suggest some differences in patterns of literacy acquisition for Chinese, compared with more regular alphabetic orthographies.

The present study reported data on phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and Chinese literacy skills of 294 children from an 8-year longitudinal study. Results showed that mainland Chinese children's preliterate syllable awareness at ages 4 to 6 years uniquely predicted post-literate morphological awareness at ages 7 to 10 years. Preliterate syllable awareness directly contributed to character reading and writing at age 11 years, while post-literate phonemic awareness predicted only character reading at age 11 years. In addition, preliterate syllable and morphological awareness at ages 4 to 6 years had indirect effects on character reading and writing, reading fluency, and reading comprehension at age 11 years, through post-literate morphological awareness at ages 7 to 10 years. Findings underscore the significant role of syllable awareness in Chinese character reading and writing, and the importance of morphological awareness in character-level processing and high-level literacy skills. More importantly, our results suggest the unique relation of syllable awareness and morphological awareness in Chinese as they focus on the same unit, which is also likely to map directly onto a character, the basic unit for high-level Chinese reading skills.