No abstract

An in-depth exploration of the associations of two aspects of morphological awareness in Chinese—homophone awareness and lexical compounding awareness—to Chinese word reading and vocabulary knowledge was the primary focus of the present study. Among 154 9-year-old Hong Kong Chinese children, both lexical compounding and homophone awareness were significantly associated with word reading (r = .54 for compounding, r = .38 for homophones) and vocabulary knowledge (r = .41 for compounding, r = .53 for homophones). However, with autoregressors additionally statistically controlled, homophone awareness remained uniquely associated with vocabulary but not word reading; lexical compounding was uniquely associated with both word reading and vocabulary. Path analyses best illustrated this pattern. Both morphological awareness constructs are likely bidirectionally associated with word reading and vocabulary knowledge. However, homophone awareness is more centrally associated with vocabulary knowledge because it taps specific, existing morpheme knowledge. In contrast, lexical compounding requires structural understanding of one's language, which seems to be helpful for both learning to read and vocabulary acquisition in Chinese.

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.

Some children struggle with mathematics. Among these children, some of them may be learners with mathematical difficulties. While research has revealed multiple deficits as candidate causes for mathematical difficulties and probable subtypes, the cognitive profiles of these subtypes are not fully understood. Moreover, we have yet to discover whether children may move in or out of these subtypes over time. This study set out to identify the subtypes of mathematical difficulties as well as their stability. Using cluster analyses, we discovered 5 distinctive subtypes among children with mathematical difficulties over the first 2 years of elementary school: the number sense deficit subtype, the numerosity coding deficit subtype, the symbolic deficit subtype, the working memory subtype, and a mild difficulty group. These subtypes showed moderate stability. While some subtypes appeared to be somewhat stable over time, some developed into another profile of deficits and still some emerged only at later points in the development. Understanding the cognitive profiles of different subtypes of mathematical difficulties can better help researchers and educators to devise intervention strategies that build on what the children are able to do and improve what they are still struggling.