Understanding chinese developmental dyslexia: Morphological awareness as a core cognitive construct.

Abstract

Tasks representing 9 cognitive constructs of potential importance to understanding Chinese reading development and impairment were administered to 75 children with dyslexia and 77 age-matched children without reading difficulties in 5th and 6th grade. Logistic regression analyses revealed that dyslexic readers were best distinguished from age-matched controls with tasks of morphological awareness, speeded number naming, and vocabulary skill; performance on tasks of visual skills or phonological awareness failed to distinguish the groups. Path analyses further revealed that a construct of morphological awareness was the strongest consistent predictor of a variety of literacy-related skills across both groups. Findings suggest that morphological awareness may be a core theoretical construct necessary for explaining variability in reading Chinese.

Impact of Foreign Language Learning on Children’s Language Competence

“…In addition, phonemic awareness difference has not been found in the comparative study on dyslexia children and non-dyslexia children (McBride-Chang Shu, Wu, & Liu, 2006). However, in the longitudinal experiment on relationship of different levels of phonological information units and reading ability, Newman, Tardif, HUANG, and SHU (2011) found that both Chinese and English oral characteristics supported phonemic processing, which was helpful to beginners' language understanding.…”

Cross-Cultural/Linguistic Differences in the Prevalence of Developmental Dyslexia and the Hypothesis of Granularity and Transparency

“…Moreover, Mandarin Chinese has a large number of homophonic morphemes and homophonic characters. Therefore it is often stated that the use of phonological information may not be as critical in reading Chinese as it is in reading alphabetic languages (Ho, Chan, Lee, Tsang, & Luan, 2004;Ho, Chan, Tsang, & Lee, 2002;Shu, McBride-Chang,Wu, & Liu, 2006). If this were the case, then a high incidence of phonological dyslexia in Chinese should not be seen (cf the Hypothesis of Granularity and Transparency (Wydell & Butterworth, 1999)).…”

Typical and Dyslexic Development in Learning to Read Chinese

“…The role of morphological awareness, visual-orthographic skills, and rapid automatized naming in reading acquisition and impairment has also been demonstrated (e.g., Ho et al, 2004;Shu et al, 2006). What assessments can best examine those cognitive skills and are most sensitive to differences in reading ability at different stages of development?…”

“…However, recent studies have suggested RAN to be a consistent predictor of Chinese reading development, in which linking printed information with a given phonological representation arbitrarily is important. It predicts reading fluency and accuracy in both typically developing children and dyslexics (Ho & Lai, 1999;Ho et al, 2000;Shu, McBride-Chang, Wu, & Liu, 2006;Lei, Pan, Liu, McBride-Chang, Li, Zhang, Chen, Tardif, Liang, Zhang, & Shu, 2011; in press).…”

“…Testing 147 Hong Kong children with dyslexia on a number of literacy and cognitive tasks, Ho, et al (2004) found that rapid naming deficit (57%) and orthographic deficit (42%) were the most dominant types of cognitive deficits in Chinese developmental dyslexia, while the relatively small proportion of dyslexic children has phonological deficits (29%) and visual deficits (27%). Shu, et al (2006) specifically examined the role of morphological skills in Chinese dyslexia besides other cognitive skills. Comparing 75 dyslexic with 77 normal children from primary schools in Beijing, the study systematically examined their literacy skills (character naming, reading comprehension, and dictation), linguistic and nonlinguistic cognitive skills with morphological awareness, rapid naming, phonological awareness, verbal short-term memory, lexical vocabulary, visual spatial test, articulatory rate, visual attention and nonverbal short-term memory tasks.…”