The relationship of character reading and spelling: A longitudinal study in Chinese

Abstract

Background The aim of this longitudinal study was to examine the relationship between character reading and spelling and to explore the role of reading‐related skills in Chinese literacy. Methods A test battery that included measures of morphological awareness (homophone awareness and compound word awareness), orthographic awareness, rapid automatised naming, character reading, spelling, and IQ was administered to 127 first grade students from two primary schools in mainland China. Results Controlling for IQ and age, the results of hierarchical regressive analyses revealed that prior reading affected subsequent spelling, and character reading Time 1 predicted spelling Time 2, β value was 0.20; character reading Time 2 predicted spelling Time 3, β value was 0.40. However, prior spelling did not affect subsequent reading. In addition, compound word awareness Time 2 and orthographic awareness Time 2 were found to mediate character reading Time 1 and spelling Time 3. Conclusions This study suggests that reading influences spelling across time points from grade 1 to grade 2, and compound word awareness and orthographic awareness play important mediator roles in the process.

The reciprocal relation between morphological awareness and spelling in Chinese: A longitudinal study of primary school students

“…Therefore, reading may play a more important role in the development of morphological awareness. Previous study [ 25 ] has also found that reading affects the development of children’s morphological awareness. The development of morphological awareness could be more affected by reading than by spelling.…”

“…Spelling. The character dictation task was adopted to test spelling including one practice and 36 test items, which had been used in the previous study [25]. Children were asked to write down the target character on an answer sheet (A4 paper size) after it had been repeated three times.…”

The Reciprocal Relationship Between Handwriting Fluency and Spelling Accuracy in Chinese: A Longitudinal Study

“…Regarding Chinese character dictation tasks (Li et al, 2017), easyitems and difficult-items dictation tasks were used to examine spelling accuracy. Children were asked to dictate a target word in disyllabic words, such as "读" /du2/ [read] in "读 书" /du2 shu1/ [read books].…”

“…Moreover, spelling is a complex cognitive process that emphasizes accuracy. Spelling accuracy is a core indicator of children's spelling abilities, and dictation has been conventionally adopted to test spelling accuracy in alphabetic languages (Lam and McBride, 2018) and morphosyllabic languages (Li et al, 2017)]. In the process of dictation, when children hear a spoken word, they need to spell out this word, with the help of grapheme-phoneme correspondence and complex orthographic rules (Brown and Ellis, 1994).…”

Exploring Relationships Between L2 Chinese Character Writing and Reading Acquisition From Embodied Cognitive Perspectives: Evidence From HSK Big Data

“…For example, Wong (2018) measured writing fluency using a character copying task with restricted time. In the research of Li et al (2019) , writing was assessed with a dictation task.…”