Chinese and English reading-related skills in L1 and L2 Chinese-speaking children in Hong Kong

Effect of Twinning on Chinese and English Vocabulary Knowledge

“…There were 26 Chinese and 15 English words in the word definition test, which was also used recently by Zhou et al (2018). Test procedure and scoring were modeled after the vocabulary subscale of the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scale (Thorndike, Hagen, & Sattler, 1986), requiring the children to explain words orally presented by the experimenter.…”

“…The current Chinese and English vocabulary measures were considered valid and sensitive because they had been used successfully in previous studies in terms of their robust correlations with other variables of theoretical interest, such as morphological awareness for receptive and expressive vocabulary (Tong et al, 2018), and word reading and phonological awareness for word definition (Tong et al, 2018; Zhou et al, 2018). The strong intercorrelations among these vocabulary measures reported in Tong et al (2018) and in the present study also suggested good content validity (see Table 2).…”

The culturally co-opted brain: how literacy affects the human mind

“…Chinese, for instance, makes use of a morphosyllabic system whereas English uses an alphabetic script. Zhou et al (2018) compared native Chinese-speaking children (L1) with children learning Chinese as second language (L2). As expected, the native Chinese-speaking children showed a clear advantage in Chinese word reading and writing, but the L2 group showed an advantage in English word reading and writing.…”

How to learn Chinese characters? Exploring the effectiveness of different learning methods in young Singaporean children

“…Several studies on young native speakers have highlighted the important role of visualorthographic skills in young Chinese learners' reading development (Tong, McBride-Chang, Shu & Wong, 2009;Anderson et al, 2013;Zhou et al, 2017) and promoted the use of Pinyin in learning Chinese characters (Shu & Liu, 1994;Lin et al, 2010;Lü, 2017). As these studies were mostly conducted in Chinese or Cantonese-speaking countries, the language environment that these children are exposed to is comparatively different from Singapore's multilingual environment.…”

“…Similarly, several studies on young native speakers have highlighted the important role of visualorthographic skills in young Chinese learners' reading development (Tong et al, 2009;Anderson et al, 2013;Zhou et al, 2017). Studies of Chinese literacy development on children in Hong…”