Annie Yixun Li

The Education University of Hong Kong | ied · Department of Early Childhood Education (ECE)

To increase early identification and intervention of dyslexia, a prescreening instrument is critical to identifying children at risk. The present work sought to shorten and validate the 30-item Mandarin Dyslexia Screening Behavior Checklist for Primary School Students (the full checklist; Fan et al., 心理与行为研究, 19, 521–527, 2021). Our participants we...

Background To better understand the intricate science of reading development, both cognitive and affective factors must be taken into consideration. This developmental study aims to enrich the literature by exploring how reading motivation – an affective factor – contributes to reading comprehension in Chinese elementary schoolers, beyond well‐acce...

Background It is well evident that individuals' levels of print exposure are significantly correlated with their reading ability across languages, and an author recognition test is commonly used to measure print exposure objectively. For the first time, the current work developed and validated a Simplified Chinese Author Recognition Test (SCART) an...

Orthographic learning is the process that supports children in becoming skilled word readers. How orthographic learning occurs has been one of the central questions in the scientific studies of reading. The present systematic review focuses on experimental studies of orthographic learning via self-teaching. It explains and discusses the universalit...

Imageability has been shown to be one of the critical psycholinguistic variables that help us understand lexical processing across many languages, but it is a less studied variable in non-alphabetic Chinese with a large population of native speakers. The present study sought to build up the first large-scale imageability database for Chinese by col...

The present work collected familiarity norms for 20,275 two-character, 1231 three-character, and 2819 four-character simplified Chinese words from 1300 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. The familiarity of each word was rated on a 7-point scale by at least 21 participants. The results supported the reliability and validity of the present familiar...

Children can teach themselves new words via the process of independent text reading—previous studies on self-teaching heavily focused on learning to read in a first language (L1). Limited work to date has been devoted to second language learning (L2). The present study aimed to fill this gap by investigating self-teaching among English Language Lea...

The present study investigated the phonological and semantic aspects of written word learning among children with dyslexia, taking into account their use of phonetic and semantic cues embedded in words. Fifty-three Mandarin-speaking fifth graders were taught the pronunciations and meanings of 24 Chinese single-character pseudowords (children with d...

In reading Chinese words, learners may process segment and tone either separately or as an integral unit, as evidenced in previous research. The present study compared two ways—Segmental versus Whole-Syllable-Based Training—for improving learners’ phonological and word learning in Chinese as a novel language, while controlling for learners’ musical...

Rapid automatized naming (RAN) is a strong predictor of reading across languages. However, it remains unclear if the effects of RAN in first language (L1) transfer to reading in second language (L2) and if the results vary as a function of the orthographic proximity of L1-L2. To fill this gap in the literature, we examined the role of RAN in readin...

Rapid automatized naming (RAN) is a strong predictor of reading across languages. However , it remains unclear if the effects of RAN in first language (L1) transfer to reading in second language (L2) and if the results vary as a function of the orthographic proximity of L1-L2. To fill this gap in the literature, we examined the role of RAN in readi...

This chapter discusses orthographic learning, i.e., how children learn the relation between their spoken language and writing system. The process is discussed for children learning to read and write in one language, as well as for multilingual children acquiring literacy in more than one language. In both cases, the developmental course is mapped f...

This chapter discusses the theoretical frameworks for artificial intelligence (AI) teachers and how AI teachers have been applied to facilitate game-based literacy learning in existing empirical studies. While the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in education is a relatively emerging research area, it has received increasing attention in...

Background Previous work suggests that children can teach themselves new written words via reading aloud texts independently (i.e., orthographic learning via self‐teaching). In self‐teaching in Chinese, regular phonetic radicals and transparent semantic radicals facilitate orthographic learning. The present study examined the roles of phonetic and...

Children can teach themselves new words via independent text reading. Previous studies on self-teaching heavily focused on learning to read in a first language (L1). Limited work was devoted to learning a second language (L2). We investigated the roles of exposure time of target pseudowords (four vs. six), availability of context (cohesive story vs...

The present study investigated whether and to what extent children with dyslexia utilize visual and phonetic strategies in character learning. A paired associate learning paradigm was used in two experiments to train children’s pronunciation-orthography associations of novel words, with a recall task 1 week later for retention. Experiment 1 include...

According to the self-teaching hypothesis, children can self-teach new written words via phonological recoding—translating written words into their verbal pronunciations. Moreover, learning words in meaningful story contexts supports learning when phonological recoding is reduced (e.g., when encountering irregular words). The current study tested t...

Backgrounds Decoding and vocabulary are two essential abilities to reading comprehension. Investigating the roles of decoding and vocabulary in Chinese reading development can not only provide empirical evidence to enrich the current reading theories but also have implications for educational practice. Aims To examine the developing importance of...

Pinyin is an alphabetic script that denotes pronunciations of Chinese characters. Studies have shown that Pinyin instruction enhances both phonological awareness (e.g., Shu et al., Developmental Science, 2008, 11, 171–181) and character reading (e.g., Lin et al., Psychological Science, 2010, 21, 1117–1122) in Chinese children. In the present study,...

This chapter discusses orthographic learning, i.e., how children learn the relation between their spoken language and writing system. The process is discussed for children learning to read and write in one language, as well as for multilingual children acquiring literacy in more than one language. In both cases, the developmental course is mapped f...

The present study tested the self-teaching hypothesis in orthographic learning in Chinese and examined the roles of semantic radicals and writing practice. Twenty-four Mandarin-speaking third graders read and comprehended eight two-sentence stories in a read-twice condition and eight in a read-write condition. Each story contained two pseudo-charac...

Differences in how writing systems represent language raise important questions about the extent to which the role of linguistic skills such as phonological awareness and morphological awareness in reading is universal. In this meta-analysis, we examined the relationship between phonological awareness (PA), morphological awareness (MA), and reading...

This study investigates the contributions of semantic, phonological, and orthographic factors to morphological awareness of 413 Chinese-speaking students in Grades 2, 4, and 6, and its relationship with reading comprehension. Participants were orally presented with pairs of bimorphemic compounds and asked to judge whether the first morphemes of the...

Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) has been found to predict mathematics. However, the nature of their relationship remains unclear. Thus, the purpose of this study was two-fold: (a) to examine how RAN (numeric and non-numeric) predicts a sub-domain of mathematics (arithmetic fluency), and (b) to examine what processing skills may account for the RAN-a...

Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) has been found to predict mathematics. However, the nature of their relationship remains unclear. Thus, the purpose of this study was two-fold: (a) to examine how RAN (numeric and non-numeric) predicts a subdomain of mathematics (arithmetic fluency), and (b) to examine what processing skills may account for the RAN-ar...

Title: Does writing system influence the association between phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and reading? A meta-­‐analysis Type of paper: Spoken or interactive poster Preference for participation: Yes Abstract (max = 250): Purpose: The purpose of this meta-­‐analysis was to examine whether the effects of phonological awareness (PA...