This study investigated the role of morphological awareness in understanding Chinese word reading and dictation among Chinese-speaking adolescent readers in Hong Kong as well as the cognitive-linguistic profile of early adolescent readers with dyslexia. Fifty-four readers with dyslexia in Grades 5 and 6 were compared with 54 chronological age-matched (CA) typical readers on the following measures of cognitive-linguistic and literacy skills: morphological awareness, phonological awareness, visual-orthographic knowledge, rapid naming, vocabulary knowledge, verbal short-term memory (STM), Chinese word reading, and dictation (or spelling). The results indicated that early adolescent readers with dyslexia performed less well than the typical readers on all cognitive-linguistic and literacy measures except the phonological measures. Both groups' scores showed substantial correlations between morphological awareness and Chinese word reading and dictation. Visual-orthographic knowledge and rapid naming were also associated with dictation in early adolescent readers with and without dyslexia, respectively. Moderated multiple regression analyses further revealed that morphological awareness and rapid naming explained unique variance in word reading and dictation for the readers with dyslexia and typical readers separately after controlling readers' age and group effect. These results highlight the potential importance of morphological awareness and rapid naming in Chinese word reading and writing in Chinese early adolescents' literacy development and impairment.
To examine cognitive correlates of dyslexia in Chinese and reading difficulties in English as a foreign language, a total of 14 Chinese dyslexic children (DG), 16 poor readers of English (PE), and 17 poor readers of both Chinese and English (PB) were compared to a control sample (C) of 17 children, drawn from a statistically representative sample of 177 second graders. Children were tested on pure copying of unfamiliar stimuli, rapid automatized naming (RAN), phoneme deletion, syllable deletion, and morphological awareness. With children's ages and Raven's nonverbal reasoning statistically controlled, the PE and PB groups were significantly lower than the C group on phoneme deletion and RAN tasks, while the DG performed significantly better than the PB group on the RAN task. The copying task distinguished the DG group from the C group. Findings particularly highlight the importance of phoneme awareness for word reading in English (but not Chinese), the potential need for fluency training for children with reading difficulties in both Chinese and English, and the important role that copying skills could have specifically in understanding impairment of literacy skills in Chinese (but not English).
A B S T R A C TConsidering the importance attached to writing as a life skill, this study investigated the nature and variability of adults' aid to Zambian second graders in the context of shared writing in Bemba (first language), and the relations between this support and students' literacy and cognitive-metalinguistic skills. Fifty-seven children and their caregivers were videotaped while writing word items in Bemba. To document the adults' literate mediation (i.e., lettersound correspondences) and print mediation (i.e., letter formation), the adult support was coded at the letter level, and demand for precision mediation (i.e., expectation for correcting writing errors) was coded at the word level. Results revealed that the adults provided diverse but mostly low-level support for literate and print mediation dimensions. In contrast, the adults also provided high-level support for the demand for precision dimension. Overall, adult literate support uniquely explained children's word reading and writing, including orthographic awareness and alphabet sound knowledge, and print support explained children's alphabet knowledge and orthographic awareness. Furthermore, demand for precision support was also linked to students' word reading and phonological awareness. Thus, despite providing low-level writing support, adult support was associated with children's literacy and language-related skills. The results also underscore the potential importance of caregivers as literacy resources to enhance acquisition of literacy skills in an orthography and region not commonly investigated (i.e., Bemba in subSaharan Africa).A great deal of research has demonstrated the importance of cognitive/metalinguistic abilities in early reading development across different cultures and languages (see, e.g.,
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