Hua Shu

• Beijing Normal University

Introduction: Newborn cries exhibit a richness of melody and rhythmicity, yet their rhythmic features have been less studied. Methods: In this study, we analyzed the amplitude modulation of 1,884 cries from 30 Chinese newborns. Results: The group-averaged amplitude modulation spectrum revealed an evident increase in energy between 0.5 and 8 Hz...

Background/Objectives: In a tonal language like Chinese, phonologically contrasting tones signify word meanings at the syllable level. Although the development of lexical tone perception ability has been examined in many behavioral studies, its developmental trajectory from childhood to adulthood at the neural level remains unclear. This cross-sect...

We examined the relations between parental socioeconomic status, attitudes toward the home teaching of literacy, expectations for children’s literacy, educational involvement, and children’s reading skills in Chinese kindergarten children across socioeconomic contexts. Five hundred and fifty-four children (Mage = 74.18 months) from Beijing (represe...

Although family factors are considered important for children’s language acquisition, the evidence comes primarily from affluent societies. Thus, this study aimed to examine the relations between family factors (family’s socioeconomic status [SES], home literacy activities, access to print resources, and parental beliefs) and children’s vocabulary...

While it has been shown that socioeconomic status (SES) is important for children’s literacy development in their first language (L1), less is known about its association with reading in a second language (L2). The present study examined the different effects of SES on the acquisition of reading in Chinese as L1 and English as L2 from ages 7 to 11,...

Although it has been established that cross-modal activations occur in the occipital cortex during auditory processing among congenitally and early blind listeners, it remains uncertain whether these activations in various occipital regions reflect sensory analysis of specific sound properties, non-perceptual cognitive operations associated with ac...

Background ADHD and developmental dyslexia (DD) frequently co-occur. However, it is unclear why some children with ADHD acquire DD while others do not. Methods A total of 830 children (including typically developing controls, ADHD only, DD only, and ADHD + DD groups) of two ages (younger: first–third grade; older: fourth–sixth grade) were assessed...

Poor phonological awareness is associated with greater risk for reading disability. The underlying neural mechanism of such association may lie in the brain processing of phonological information. Lower amplitude of auditory mismatch negativity (MMN) has been associated with poor phonological awareness and with the presence of reading disability. T...

Humans recognize one another by identifying their voices and faces. For sighted people, the integration of voice and face signals in corresponding brain networks plays an important role in facilitating the process. However, individuals with vision loss primarily resort to voice cues to recognize a person’s identity. It remains unclear how the neura...

Chinese developmental dyslexia (DD) research provides important insights into the language-universal and language-specific mechanisms underlying dyslexia. In this article, we review recent advances in Chinese DD. Converging behavioral evidence suggests that, while phonological and rapid automatized naming deficits are language universal, orthograph...

This paper examines the phonemic awareness among young Chinese children through two studies. Study 1 implemented a cross-sectional design with 120 children (4-6 years old) to explore the developmental level of phonemic awareness. Study 2 monitored the longitudinal development of 127 kindergarten students in a similar age period and further fathomed...

Reading disability exhibited defects in different cognitive domains, including word reading fluency, word reading accuracy, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming and morphological awareness. To identify the genetic basis of Chinese reading disability, we conducted a genome‐wide association study (GWAS) of the cognitive traits related to...

Reading disability exhibited defects in different cognitive domains, including word reading fluency, word reading accuracy, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and morphological awareness. To identify the genetic basis of Chinese reading disability, we conducted a genome wide association study (GWAS) of the cognitive traits related to...

Expectancy-value theory (EVT) positing that expectancy of success (e.g., self-concept) and task values (e.g., intrinsic value) jointly predict individual’s outcome-related performance has been widely used to explain students’ motivational process worldwide. However, cross-national generalizability of EVT in reading domains has been less studied. Th...

Conquering print-sound mappings (e.g., grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules) is vital for developing fluent reading skills. In neuroimaging research, this ability can be indexed by activation differences between audiovisual congruent against incongruent conditions in brain areas such as the left superior temporal cortex. In line with it, individua...

Effortless print-sound integration is essential to reading development, and the superior temporal cortex (STC) is the most critical brain region. However, to date, the conclusion is almost restricted to alphabetic orthographies. To examine the neural basis in non-alphabetic languages and its relationship with reading abilities, we conducted a funct...

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...

While the close relationship between the brain system for speech processing and reading development is well-documented in alphabetic languages, whether and how such a link exists in children in a language without systematic grapheme-phoneme correspondence has not been directly investigated. In the present study, we measured Chinese children’s brain...

While emerging neuroimaging studies examine the role of rapid automatized naming (RAN) in reading, evidence is restricted to alphabetic languages and focused on brain activation. The present study investigated the shared and unique functional and effective connectivity between Chinese character naming with alphanumeric (digits) and non-alphanumeric...

This report introduces the Beijing Sentence Corpus (BSC). This is a Chinese sentence corpus of eye-tracking data with relatively clear word boundaries. In addition, we report predictability norms for each word in the corpus. Eye movement corpora are available in alphabetic scripts such as English, German, and French. However, there is no publicly a...

Conquering grapheme-phoneme correspondence is necessary for developing fluent reading in alphabetic orthographies. In neuroimaging research, this ability is associated with brain activation differences between the audiovisual congruent against incongruent conditions, especially in the left superior temporal cortex. Studies have also shown such a ne...

Purpose Although acquisition of Chinese lexical tones by second language (L2) learners has been intensively investigated, very few studies focused on categorical perception (CP) of lexical tones by highly proficient L2 learners. This study was designed to address this issue with behavioral and electrophysiological measures. Method Behavioral ident...

Theories of reading comprehension emphasize decoding and listening comprehension as two essential components. The current study aimed to investigate how Chinese character decoding and context-driven auditory semantic integration contribute to reading comprehension in Chinese middle school students. Seventy-five middle school students were tested. C...

Theories of reading comprehension emphasize decoding and listening comprehension as two essential components. The current study aimed to investigate how Chinese character decoding and context-driven auditory semantic integration contribute to reading comprehension in Chinese middle school students. Seventy-five middle school students were tested. C...

The current study compared the language-familiarity effect on voice recognition by blind listeners and sighted individuals. Both groups performed better on the recognition of native voices than nonnative voices, but the language-familiarity effect is smaller in the blind than in the sighted group, with blind individuals performing better than their...

Compared with the large number of studies on reading of children with hearing loss (HL) in alphabetic languages, there are only a very limited number of studies on reading of Chinese-speaking children with HL. It remains unclear how phonological, orthographic, and semantic skills contribute to reading fluency of Chinese school-age children with HL....

The present longitudinal study investigated the effects of early childhood socioeconomic status on language-related resting-state functional connectivity and reading outcome in adolescence. Seventy-nine children participated in this study. Socioeconomic status was measured via parent questionnaire measuring parental education and family income at 1...

Previous work has shown that children with dyslexia are impaired in speech recognition in adverse listening conditions. Our study further examined how semantic context and fundamental frequency (F0) contours contribute to word recognition against interfering speech in dyslexic and non-dyslexic children. Thirty-two children with dyslexia and 35 chro...

Are the brain mechanisms of reading acquisition similar across writing systems? And do similar brain anomalies underlie reading difficulties in alphabetic and ideographic reading systems? In a cross-cultural paradigm, we measured the fMRI responses to words, faces and houses in 96 Chinese and French 10-year-old children, half of whom were strugglin...

The role of visual skills in reading acquisition has long been debated and whether there is shared neurobiological basis between visual skills and reading is not clear. This study investigated the relationship between Visual Matching and reading and their shared neuroanatomical basis. Two hundred and ninety-three typically developing Mandarin-speak...

Although several studies have examined the role of home literacy environment (HLE) in learning to read in Western societies, little is known about the role of HLE in Chinese reading. In addition, the few studies in Chinese have not tested the possible effects of HLE on reading comprehension. Thus, the purpose of this study was to examine the direct...

The current study examined whether the blind are superior to sighted listeners in voice recognition. Three subject groups, including 17 congenitally blind, 18 late blind, and 18 sighted, showed no significant differences in the immediate voice recognition test. In the delayed test conducted two weeks later, however, both congenitally blind and late...

Although previous studies have shown that early pinyin knowledge predicts future character recognition, it remains unclear if early character recognition also predicts future pinyin knowledge. Thus, the purpose of this study was to examine the cross lagged relations between pinyin knowledge and character recognition and whether their relation is me...

Effortless print-sound integration is essential to reading development, and the superior temporal cortex (STC) is the most critical brain region. However, to date, the conclusion is almost restricted to alphabetic orthographies. To examine the neural basis in non-alphabetic languages and its relationship with reading abilities, we conducted a funct...

This study used the Musical Ear Test [Wallentin, Nielsen, Friis-Olivarius, Vuust, and Vuust (2010). Learn. Indiv. Diff. 20, 188–196] to compare musical aptitude of native Japanese and Chinese speakers. Although the two groups had similar overall accuracy, they showed significant differences in subtest performance. Specifically, the Chinese speakers...

In the present longitudinal study, we investigated the joint effect of early family factors and long-term vocabulary development on the structure of reading-related white matter pathways in adolescents. Seventy-nine children participated in this study. Family environment was measured via parental questionnaire between age 1 and age 3. From age 4 to...

While previous studies have shown that the impact of phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) on dyslexia depends on orthographic complexity in alphabetic languages, it remains unclear whether this relationship generalizes to the more complex orthography of Chinese. We investigated the predictive power of PA, RAN, and morpholo...

Previous studies of tonal speech perception have generally suggested harder or later access to lexical tone than segmental information, but the mechanism underlying the lexical tone disadvantage is unclear. Using a speeded discrimination paradigm free of context information, we confirmed multiple lines of evidence for the lexical tone disadvantage...

To determine whether the neural anomalies underlying developmental dyslexia are universal across languages or influenced by the writing system, we tested 10-year-old Chinese and French children, with or without dyslexia, in a cross-cultural fMRI paradigm. We compared their brain responses to words written in their known script, faces and houses whi...

This study investigated the association of timed visual processing tasks varying in levels of phonological processing with word reading. We tested 293 Chinese children on Cross Out, Visual Matching, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and Chinese character recognition across three to five years. Children’s character recognition at ages 6 and 7 predicte...

Socioeconomic status (SES) disparities have profound impacts on child development and health, which are linked to negative emotions and alterations in the integrity of stress-sensitive hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA)-axis system. However, its underlying psychophysiological mechanisms remain poorly understood. Here we investigate how family SES...

This study adopted the Musical Ear Test [Wallentin, Nielsen, Friis-Olivarius, Vuust, and Vuust (2010). Learn. Indiv. Diff. 20, 188–196] to compare musical competence of sighted and congenitally blind Mandarin speakers. On the rhythm subtest, the blind participants outperformed the sighted. On the melody subtest, however, the two groups performed eq...

Behavioral and imaging studies in alphabetic languages have shown that morphological processing is a discrete and independent element of lexical access. However, there is no explicit marker of morphological structure in Chinese complex words, such that the extent to which morpheme meaning is related to word meaning is unknown. Event-related potenti...

What is the time course of activation of phonological information in logographic writing systems like Chinese, in which meaning is prioritized over sound? We used a manipulation of phonological regularity to examine foveal and parafoveal phonological processing of Chinese phonograms at lexical and sublexical levels during Chinese sentence reading i...

We examined what aspects of the home literacy environment (formal home literacy activities, informal home literacy activities, access to literacy resources, age of onset of literacy instruction, child’s interest in reading, and parents’ expectations) differentiate Chinese children at risk for reading difficulties from their not-at-risk controls. Ei...

In early life auditory discrimination ability can be enhanced by passive sound exposure. In contrast, in adulthood passive exposure seems to be insufficient to promote discrimination ability, but this has been tested only with a single short exposure session in humans. We tested whether passive exposure to unfamiliar auditory stimuli can result in...

The cover image, by Mengmeng Su et al., is based on the Paper Vocabulary growth rate from preschool to school‐age years is reflected in the connectivity of the arcuate fasciculus in 14‐year‐old children, DOI: 10.1111/desc.12647.

We aimed to investigate the role of dorsal and ventral visual systems in rapid naming of simple Chinese characters. Twenty college students (10 female; Mage = 22.5 years) were required to covertly read a character- and a cross-matrix during an fMRI experiment. A basic prosaccade and a prosaccade-naming task was also performed to confirm the functio...

Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which semantic context and F 0 contours affect speech recognition by Mandarin-speaking, kindergarten-aged children with cochlear implants (CIs). Method The experimental design manipulated two factors, that is, semantic context, by comparing the intelligibility of normal sentence ve...

Significance Musical training is beneficial to speech processing, but this transfer’s underlying brain mechanisms are unclear. Using pseudorandomized group assignments with 74 4- to 5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children, we showed that, relative to an active control group which underwent reading training and a no-contact control group, piano traini...

Chinese is a logographic language that is different from alphabetic languages in visual and semantic complexity. Thus far, it is still unclear whether Chinese children with dyslexia show similar disruption of white matter pathways as in alphabetic languages. The present study focused on the alteration of white matter pathways in Chinese children wi...

We investigated whether preschoolers with poor phonological awareness (PA) skills had impaired cortical basis for detecting speech feature, and whether speech perception influences future literacy outcomes in preschoolers. We recorded ERP responses to speech in 52 Chinese preschoolers. The results showed that the poor PA group processed speech chan...

During sentence reading, low spatial frequency information afforded by spaces between words is the primary factor for eye guidance in spaced writing systems, whereas saccade generation for unspaced writing systems is less clear and under debate. In the present study, we investigated whether word-boundary information, provided by alternating colors...

The ability to read is essential for cognitive development. To deepen our understanding of reading acquisition, we explored the neuroanatomical correlates (cortical thickness; CT) of word-reading fluency and sentence comprehension efficiency in Chinese with a group of typically developing children (N = 21; 12 females and 9 males; age range 10.7–12....

The co-occurrence of reading comprehension difficulties for first language (L1) Chinese and second language (L2) English and associated longitudinal cognitive–linguistic correlates in each language were investigated. Sixteen poor comprehenders in English and 16 poor comprehenders in Chinese, 18 poor readers in both, and 18 children with normal perf...

We examined whether different measures of print exposure assess the same underlying concept and how these different measures relate to vocabulary breadth and depth. One hundred forty-seven students attending the third year of kindergarten in Jining, China, were assessed on nonverbal IQ, vocabulary breadth and depth, and on their knowledge of book t...

In the present study, we used a three-time point longitudinal design to investigate the associations of morphological awareness to word reading and spelling in a small group of those with and without dyslexia taken from a larger sample of 164 Hong Kong Chinese children who remained in a longitudinal study across ages 6, 7 and 8. Among those 164 chi...

The goal of this developmental speech perception study was to assess whether and how age group modulated the influences of high-level semantic context and low-level fundamental frequency (F0) contours on the recognition of Mandarin speech by elementary and middle-school-aged children in quiet and interference backgrounds. The results revealed diffe...

Reading plays a key role in education and communication in modern society. Learning to read establishes the connections between the visual word form area (VWFA) and language areas responsible for speech processing. Using resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) and Granger Causality Analysis (GCA) methods, the current developmental study aimed...

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...

The present longitudinal study investigated the predictive power of preschool linguistic skills and early family factors on children's comprehensive literacy skills at the end of primary school in 262 Chinese children. The results indicated that a substantial (20–34%) share of variance of 5th grade (age 11) literacy skills in Chinese could be expla...

COVER ILLUSTRATION: ROBO1 polymorphisms, callosal connectivity, and reading skills. The microstructural integrity of the corpus callosum (measured by diffusion MRI) was found to mediate the effects of two ROBO1 (a famous axon-guidance-receptor gene) polymorphisms on Chinese reading performance in childrenwith typical development. For more details,...

This study followed up Wang, Shu, Zhang, Liu, and Zhang [(2013). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 34(1), EL91–EL97] to investigate factors influencing older listeners' Mandarin speech recognition in quiet vs single-talker interference. Listening condition significantly interacted with F0 contours but not with semantic context, revealing that natural F0 contours...

Introduction The pattern of eye movements during reading is substantially correlated with linguistic factors. While there have been a large number of studies on the neural mechanisms of eye movements and word reading separately, a limited number of studies have compared the activation patterns of these two processes and discussed the associations o...

Background Disruptions of reading processes due to text substitutions can measure how readers use lexical information. Methods With eye‐movement recording, children and adults viewed sentences with either identical, orthographically similar, homophonic or unrelated substitutions of the first characters in target words. To the extent that readers r...

Reading comprehension is a crucial reading skill for learning and putatively contains 2 key components: reading decoding and linguistic comprehension. Current understanding of the neural mechanism underlying these reading comprehension components is lacking, and whether and how neuroanatomical features can be used to predict these 2 skills remain l...

The genetic effects on specific behavioral phenotypes are putatively mediated by specific neural functions. It remains unexplored how the axon-guidance-receptor gene ROBO1 influences reading performance through the neural system despite the identification of ROBO1 as a susceptibility gene for dyslexia. To address this issue, the present study recru...

Previous research on the longitudinal prediction of literacy development has focused mainly on the relationship between early cognitive/language skills and late literacy skills. The present study aimed to test the reliability of a number of measures reported by parents as compared to measuring cognitive and language skills in predicting subsequent...

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...

When reading a narrative text, both the dorsal and ventral visual systems are activated. To illustrate the patterns of interactions between the dorsal and ventral visual systems in text reading, we conducted analyses of functional connectivity (FC) and effective connectivity (EC) in a left-hemispheric network for reading-driven functional magnetic...

This study examines the components and developmental process of students' language capacity. We first conducted an interview with 16 linguists about the signifi cance of fostering students' language capacity, challenges as well as strategies to solve the problems. Then we divide students' language capacity into three parts, namely basic cognitive a...