Morphological Awareness, Orthographic Knowledge, and Spelling Errors: Keys to Understanding Early Chinese Literacy Acquisition

Tong, Xiuli; McBride‐Chang, Catherine; Shu, Hua; Wong, Amy

doi:10.1080/10888430903162910

Cited by 244 publications

(278 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…However, as reported by Luo et al (2011), children were asked to accept pseudo-characters, which might be easier for preschoolers. Tong et al (2009) used a lexical decision, as did Li et al (2012) and Wei et al (2014), but found that preschoolers had emerged orthographic awareness. The participants were recruited from Hong Kong in the study of Tong et al (2009), while children were from Beijing in the studies of Li et al (2012) and Wei et al (2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…Moreover, few children (approximately 10 %) had global knowledge of phonetic and semantic radicals, including both position and function, which implied that Chinese preschoolers acquired various types of orthographic knowledge at different rates. Tong, McBride-Chang, Shu, and Wong (2009) reported that 6-year-old children can distinguish real characters from a cohort of stimuli, including real characters, pseudo-characters, non-characters, and visual symbols, suggesting that orthographic awareness emerged in the preschool period. Tong and McBride-Chang (2010) added pseudo-character invention and visual configuration judgment tests, and found that the performance of 5-year-olds exceeded chance.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

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The developmental trend of orthographic awareness in Chinese preschoolers

et al. 2014

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The present study explored the developmental trend of orthographic awareness in Chinese-speaking preschoolers. A total of 184 children between 3 and 5 years of age participated in the study. Two developmental patterns of orthographic awareness were obtained. One pattern was dependent on a traditional Chinese orthographic hierarchy, with a sequence of writing system specificity, radical, whole character, radical combination rules, and stroke. Three-year-olds fully understood the writing-system-specific features of Chinese characters, and could distinguish characters from alphabetic scripts and drawings; the average accuracy was [80 %.Five-year-olds were able to distinguish radicals from numbers, as well as regard non-characters with rotated radicals and missing radicals as illegal; the average accuracy was 87 %. At 5 years of age, children could detect whole character rotated non-characters with an average accuracy of 78 %, but were not proficient in identifying non-characters with absent strokes (the average accuracy was 69 %). The 5-year-old children did not know well about radical combination rules; the average accuracy was 67 %. The other pattern was associated with violation means of noncharacters, which could be characterized as progressing from form types, to spatial formats, and finally to combination conventions. Children grasped legal form types of scripts (Chinese characters and radicals) at 3 years of age, with an average accuracy approaching 80 %. Five-year-old children detected illegal spatial characteristics of characters, such as up-down reversal, with an average accuracy of 78 %. However, children were unable to understand radical combination conventions even at 5 years of age; average accuracy was 67 %.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

The developmental trend of orthographic awareness in Chinese preschoolers

et al. 2014

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“…In Shen and Bear (2000), writing errors were categorized in 3 types-phonologically based spelling errors, graphemic spelling errors, and semantic spelling errors, in each of which there were also detailed subtypes. This method of categorization was also followed by Tong et al (2009) in their analysis of Chinese children's writing errors. In the present study, errors were not in writing but in oral reading, so that the categorization could not be the same as those of Shen and Bear (2000).…”

Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

A Developmental Study of Chinese Children’s Word and Character Reading

Tong

et al. 2016

J Psycholinguist Res

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To investigate the relationship between Chinese children's character and word reading, 62 third and 50 fifth grade children in Hong Kong were asked to read single characters and words that were comprised of these characters. Results showed that words helped children to recognize characters for both grades of children. Compared to older children, younger children's character reading was more likely to rely on the word that the character appeared in as a component; younger children made more errors in confusing the correct character with words related to it. Younger children's greater rate of meaning-related errors also underscored the role of the word in their character learning. This study confirmed the important role of words in children's character learning, and provided evidence for a developmental pattern of character and word reading in Chinese.

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“…Among third year kindergarteners in Hong Kong, morphological awareness including compounding awareness and homophone awareness longitudinally predicted Chinese character recognition after one year (Tong et al, 2009). Similarly, compounding awareness uniquely associated with Chinese character recognition among second graders in Hong Kong (McBride-Chang et al, 2005).…”

Section: Morphological Awareness As Language-specific Construct: Chinmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the recent decades, the role of different types of Chinese morphological awareness in Chinese word reading has been identified among kindergarteners and school-aged children (McBride-Chang et al, 2003;Tong et al, 2009). Among third year kindergarteners in Hong Kong, morphological awareness including compounding awareness and homophone awareness longitudinally predicted Chinese character recognition after one year (Tong et al, 2009).…”

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confidence: 99%

Within- and cross-language contributions of morphological awareness to word reading development in Chinese–English bilingual children

et al. 2017

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A growing body of cross-linguistic research has suggested that morphological awareness plays a key role in both L1 and L2 word reading among bilingual readers.However, little is known about the interaction and development of L1 and L2 morphological awareness in relation to word reading. We addressed this issue by evaluating the unique contributions of L1 Chinese and L2 English morphological awareness to word reading in both Chinese and English across Grades 2 (N=150), 5 (N=158), and 8 (N=159) Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children. Children completed five tasks of Chinese morphological awareness which tapped for compounding awareness, homophone awareness, homographic awareness, semantic radical awareness, and affix awareness, and six English morphological judgment and analogy tasks that assessed morphological awareness at three levels: inflection, derivation, and compounding. English phonological awareness, Chinese and English vocabulary, and nonverbal ability were measured as controls. Word reading was assessed in both languages. Within-language analyses revealed that Chinese morphological awareness accounted for 27%, 22%, and 12% of unique variances in MORPHOLOGICAL TRANSFER AND WORD READING 3 Chinese word reading above the control measures in Grades 2, 5, and 8 respectively.In contrast, English morphological awareness explained small but significant unique variances in English word reading, i.e., 4%, 8%, and 2%, across Grades 2, 5, and 8 respectively. Critically, there were cross-language influences: Chinese morphological awareness explained 4% of unique variance in English word reading in Grade 2 after controlling for IQ, English vocabulary, English phonological awareness, and English morphological awareness; English morphological awareness explained significant variances in Chinese word reading, i.e., 4%, 3%, and 4% in Grades 2, 5, and 8 respectively, after the relevant controls. These findings suggest a bi-directional crosslanguage transfer of morphological awareness to word reading in L1 Chinese and L2 English. However, the direction of its transfer may be constrained by some languagespecific morphological features. Morphological awareness is children's awareness of the morphemic structure of words and ability to manipulate that structure (Carlisle, 1995). Despite differences in morphological structure across languages, morphological awareness has been proposed to be a universal part of reading (Verhoeven & Perfetti, 2011). While a majority of early studies only focused on English (e.g., Fowler, Napps, & Feldman, 1985; Marslen-Wilson, Tyler, Waksler, & Older, 1994; Taft & Forster, 1975), Frost andGrainger (2000) emphasized the importance of cross-linguistic morphological research as it would contribute to a more complete understanding of the general principles guiding lexical organization. Chinese and English present as a potent language pairing for cross-linguistic comparisons given their striking differences in orthography and morphology (Ke & Xiao, 2015). Interestingly, there is evidenc...

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Morphological Awareness, Orthographic Knowledge, and Spelling Errors: Keys to Understanding Early Chinese Literacy Acquisition

Cited by 244 publications

References 27 publications

The developmental trend of orthographic awareness in Chinese preschoolers

The developmental trend of orthographic awareness in Chinese preschoolers

A Developmental Study of Chinese Children’s Word and Character Reading

Within- and cross-language contributions of morphological awareness to word reading development in Chinese–English bilingual children

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