Cognitive Correlates of Reading Fluency in Chinese School-Aged Children

Abstract

Previous studies have showed that reading fluency is strongly associated with cognitive skills, including rapid automatized naming, phonological awareness, orthographical awareness, and so on. However, these studies are largely based on alphabetic languages, and it remains unclear which cognitive factors contribute to the development of reading fluency in logographic Chinese, a language in which the graphic forms map onto morphemes (meaning) rather than phonemes. In Study 1, we tested 179 Chinese children aged 6 to 9 on a set of cognitive tasks as well as for word reading accuracy and sentence reading fluency. The results showed that rapid naming, writing fluency, and phonological awareness significantly predicted reading fluency in both beginning and intermediate readers. In addition, while the contribution of rapid naming and writing fluency increased with grades, the effect of phonological awareness decreased. In Study 2, we examined the role of visual crowding in reading fluency in a subgroup of 86 children and found that visual crowding accounted for the unique variance of individual differences in reading fluency. The findings reflect both universal and language-specific cognitive correlates of reading fluency and provide important implications for potentially effective treatment for individuals suffering from Chinese reading disabilities, particularly in terms of reading fluency.

Differences and Similarities in the Contributions of Phonological Awareness, Orthographic Knowledge and Semantic Competence to Reading Fluency in Chinese School-Age Children With and Without Hearing Loss

“…Previous studies that investigated the cognitive dynamics underlying reading fluency also revealed substantial contribution of PA to word (Landerl et al, 2019) and text reading fluency (Georgiou et al, 2008). In a non-alphabetic writing system such as Chinese, the strong links between PA and character recognition (Ho and Bryant, 1997;Li et al, 2012;Liu et al, 2017) and sentence reading fluency (Lei et al, 2011;Xue et al, 2013;Bai et al, 2020) have also been confirmed although characteristics of Chinese scripts make the grapheme-phoneme mapping different from that of an alphabetic writing system.…”

“…In addition to PA, OK which refers to the ability to use visualorthographic information during processing printed words (Barker et al, 1992;Rakhlin et al, 2014) is closely related to reading in alphabetic and non-alphabetic writing systems (O'Brien et al, 2011;Elhassan et al, 2017;Bai et al, 2020). In an alphabetic writing system, learning to read begins with learning the alphabetic principle by associating letters with their names and sounds (Shmidman and Ehri, 2010).…”

“…Reading fluency was assessed at both word and sentence levels, which were measured with the one-minute and three-minute reading tasks, respectively. The two tasks have been widely used in previous studies on reading ability of Chinese-speaking children with HL and NH and showed adequate reliability and validity (e.g., Liu et al, 2017;Zhao et al, 2019;Bai et al, 2020). In the one-minute reading task, children were required to read aloud as quickly as possible 180 two-character Chinese words (e.g., "我 们", "we") that were randomly arranged in 20 rows of 9 each.…”

Brain responses during auditory word recognition vary with reading ability in Chinese school‐age children

“…Furthermore, phonological processing has been revealed to significantly classify individuals with and without dyslexia (Wang & Bi, 2021). Thus, the before-mentioned inconsistency can be most likely explained by the multiple deficit model (Pennington, 2006(Pennington, , 2012, which proposes that a specific single deficit cannot explain all cases of dyslexia, and explained by the developmental perspective, which indicates that the effect of a particular cognitive skill on reading acquisition is a function of the developmental stage (Bai et al, 2020;Ferrer et al, 2007). Since multiple factors and cognitive-linguistic skills work together in reading development, deficits of any component may lead to reading problems.…”

Reading Ability in Patients With Tuberous Sclerosis Complex: Results of Chinese Character Reading and Reading Comprehension Tests

“…Individuals of normal intelligence with TSC might be described by their parents as having academic difficulties in school performance. The TSC-associated neuropsychiatric disorders (TAND) checklist was developed (Bai et al, 2020), and the data collected through the checklist showed that 60.5% of TSC patients aged <18 years and 54.8% aged >18 years had certain degrees of academic difficulty (de Vries et al, 2018a). It can be seen that even if there is no systematic evaluation to confirm the relationship between TSC and academic difficulties.…”