Catherine McBride-Chang’s research while affiliated with Chinese University of Hong Kong and other places

The etiology and markers of developmental dyslexia in Chinese are of great practical and theoretical interest in part because these may differ somewhat from those of alphabetic orthographies. Whereas the hallmark of dyslexia in alphabetic orthographies is phonological processing, this is not as clear in Chinese, perhaps in part because the phonological cues for character or word recognition are relatively unreliable in Chinese.

Literacy is a multilevel construct comprising word reading, spelling, and text reading comprehension. Understanding the key linguistic and cognitive factors that support word reading, spelling, and text reading comprehension is fundamentally important to elucidate the detailed nature of literacy acquisition. While most contemporary models of literacy acquisition are developed on the basis of English and other alphabetic writing systems, little attention has been paid to nonalphabetic writing system, such as Chinese. We focus on Chinese literacy acquisition and emphasize how different properties of the Chinese language (phonology, morphology, and orthography) may impact the development of different-level literacy skills. A systematic review of extant research on literacy acquisition, along with our own work on Chinese word reading, spelling, and reading comprehension, suggests that phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and orthographic skills are all important to Chinese literacy acquisition, but the relative importance of these skills varies across word reading, spelling, and reading comprehension. Moreover, the contribution of each of these linguistic and cognitive skills to a single component of literacy skills also varies in different developmental stages. This suggests that a full model of literacy acquisition should consider the linguistic features that are characteristics of the writing system, as well as developmental context.

Not all parents are skilled in scaffolding their young children`s numeracy learning. The present study investigated the effectiveness of a parent training program in promoting Filipino young children`s number sense via card game playing at home. Participants were 161 young children and their parents; families were of a relatively low socioeconomic status. During the 10-week intervention period, parents in the experimental group received training on how to use number game cards to help their children acquire various numeracy concepts; parents in the control group received no special instructions. Children in the experimental group showed greater improvements in their performance on six number sense tasks (namely numeral identification, object counting, rote counting, missing number, numerical magnitude comparison, and addition) over the intervention period than did children in the control group. Findings of the present study suggest that providing simple training to parents on strategies for fostering their young children`s number sense at home is important for giving children a good early start in basic number knowledge.

Lexical tone is one of the most prominent features in the phonological representation of words in Chinese. However, little, if any, research to date has directly evaluated how young Chinese children’s lexical tone identification skills contribute to vocabulary acquisition and character recognition. The present study distinguished lexical tones from segmental phonological awareness and morphological awareness in order to estimate the unique contribution of lexical tone in early vocabulary acquisition and character recognition. A sample of 199 Cantonese children aged 5–6 years was assessed on measures of lexical tone identification, segmental phonological awareness, morphological awareness, nonverbal ability, vocabulary knowledge, and Chinese character recognition. It was found that lexical tone awareness and morphological awareness were both associated with vocabulary knowledge and character recognition. However, there was a significant relationship between lexical tone awareness and both vocabulary knowledge and character recognition, even after controlling for the effects of age, nonverbal ability, segmental phonological awareness and morphological awareness. These findings suggest that lexical tone is a key factor accounting for individual variance in young children’s lexical acquisition in Chinese, and that lexical tone should be considered in understanding how children learn new Chinese vocabulary words, in either oral or written forms.

Both characters and words in Chinese are related to meaning, and it is interesting to consider the ways in which children process the two. Both phonetic and semantic radicals are essential for character identification. At the same time, within multi-character words, the association(s) of each character to the other(s) are additionally important for children to master. Lexical compounding is a particularly salient aspect of this process. In this chapter, we will elaborate on how characters and words might be considered to be somewhat different Chinese acquisition processes for young children and the developmental association between the two. We will begin by distinguishing these two concepts and explaining why the concepts of “character” and “word” warrant unique focuses in Chinese. We will also highlight what is meant by “reading,” i.e., the inclusion of both oral recognition (i.e., just saying the character or word aloud) and understanding of meaning of the character or word and metalinguistic skills which are important for children’s character and word learning. Next, we will highlight research on the acquisition of each, with particular attention to orthographic structure in characters and the role of morphological awareness in words. We will conclude by addressing the relations among context, words, characters, and radicals in learning and development.

Although the issue of visual skills in relation to word reading has not been central to recent explorations of read-ing development, all visual word reading involves visual skill. Children constantly face tasks of differentiating visually sim-ilar letters or words. For example, dis-tinguishing "b" from "d," "a" from "e," or "book" from "boot" all require visual differentiation. Children's orthographic knowledge and letter knowledge are causal factors in subsequent reading develop-ment in English (e.g., Badian, 1994; Lonigan et al., 2000). At a pure visual skill level, some researchers (e.g., Franceschini et al., 2012) suggest that core visual pro-cessing skills such as visual spatial atten-tion in preschoolers could be a causal factor in subsequent reading acquisition. In addition, some alphabetic readers with dyslexia may have visual processing deficits (e.g., Valdois et al., 2004; Van der Leij et al., 2013). Following this hypothe-sis, Franceschini et al. (2013) showed that action video games that strengthened children's visual attention also improved their reading speed in Italian without sacrificing reading accuracy, similar to previous interventional research training facilitating visuospatial attention skills in Italian children with dyslexia (Facoetti et al., 2003). However, orthographic depth mediates the role of visual attention in reading (Bavelier et al., 2013; Richlan, 2014). English is a more opaque orthogra-phy than Italian, and Chinese is even more opaque than English. Both eye movement and neuroimag-ing studies have demonstrated that reading Chinese affects visual processing dif-ferently than does reading alphabetic orthographies (e.g., Inhoff and Liu, 1998; Perfetti et al., 2010; Szwed et al., 2014). Inhoff and Liu (1998) found that Chinese readers used comparatively smaller visual perceptual spans than English readers. Szwed et al. (2014) found that readers of Chinese showed strong activations in intermediate visual areas of the occipital cortex; these were absent in French read-ers. Researchers have attributed these char-acteristics to perceptual learning resulting from learning to read Chinese characters (Rayner, 1998; Perfetti et al., 2010; Szwed et al., 2014). Indeed, the role of visual skills for early reading development may be stronger for reading Chinese than reading English. Pure visual skills are sometimes rela-tively strong correlates of Chinese chil-dren's reading (e.g., Mcbride-Chang et al., 2005; Luo et al., 2013). Such visual tasks likely tap at least three visual skills that may be required for Chinese character read-ing. First, a focus on visual form constancy (e.g., is this square the same size as the one embedded in other designs on the previous page?) likely has some analogies with the fact that radicals within Chinese might appear as larger or smaller or even reversed in appearance across characters. Second, a focus on visual spatial skills, i.e., identifying the same form when it is in a different direction or placed dif-ferently, might be useful when Chinese character identification requires children to reduce a compact character into compo-nent radicals. Third, visual memory may be useful in learning to read Chinese in at least two ways, namely, making asso-ciations between characters and sounds, many of which are arbitrary, sometimes referred to as visual verbal paired associate learning, and helping children to build a mental memory of how different radical parts are located within a character. What is the evidence that learning to read Chinese trains one's visual skills? A cross-cultural study (McBride-Chang et al., 2011b) found that Chinese and Korean kindergartners performed signif-icantly better than Israeli and Spanish children on a task of visual spatial relation-ships, the only visual task tested across all four cultures. Korean kindergartners tend to learn to read Korean syllables holis-tically initially, similar to how Chinese characters are taught. A superior perfor-mance on visual skills was also found by Demetriou et al. (2005) for older Chinese as compared to Greek children. In addi-tion, Huang and Hanley (1994) found that both Taiwanese and Hong Kong children showed a clear advantage on the visual form discrimination task as compared to their British peers. Interestingly, the Chinese written sys-tem has two versions, the simplified and the traditional. The simplified script, which has fewer visual features to distin-guish one character from another, may make more visual demands than does the traditional version. In one study of those learning to read traditional (in Hong Kong) as compared to simplified (in Mainland China) script, those learn-ing the simplified script outperformed those learning the traditional one on three visual tasks, namely visual discrimination, visual spatial relationships and visual clo-sure tasks (Mcbride-Chang et al., 2005), even across time. Peng et al. (2010) found that electrophysiological response poten-tials (ERPs) in the brains of those expert readers who saw characters with one stroke either added or subtracted in a few mil-liseconds showed the same basic pattern:

This 2-year longitudinal study sought to identify a developmental pattern of Chinese and English reading skills in children with and without dyslexia from 6 to 8 years of age. Three groups of 15 children each—those with dyslexia, age-matched (AM) controls, and reading-matched (RM) controls—participated. Dyslexia was diagnosed at 8 years of age. All children were tested on phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), morphological awareness, word reading, and vocabulary knowledge in both Chinese and English and also speed of processing skill. AM controls outperformed the group with dyslexia on all measures except for phonological awareness, English word reading, and vocabulary. However, those with dyslexia and AM controls developed at a similar rate across all reading-related skills from 6 to 8 years of age. Compared with the RM controls, the group with dyslexia scored higher in phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and vocabulary knowledge in both Chinese and English and also in English word reading but scored similarly in RAN. Children with dyslexia, thus, manifested clear difficulties in Chinese vocabulary knowledge, morphological awareness, and RAN as well as general speed of processing, representing a developmental lag in cognitive skills. Among these, RAN deficits are likely to be the most severe deficits in Chinese children with dyslexia.

In this 8-year longitudinal study, we traced the vocabulary growth of Chinese children, explored potential precursors of vocabulary knowledge, and investigated how vocabulary growth predicted future reading skills. Two hundred and sixty-four (264) native Chinese children from Beijing were measured on a variety of reading and language tasks over 8 years. Between the ages of 4 to 10 years, they were administered tasks of vocabulary and related cognitive skills. At age 11, comprehensive reading skills, including character recognition, reading fluency, and reading comprehension were examined. Individual differences in vocabulary developmental profiles were estimated using the intercept-slope cluster method. Vocabulary development was then examined in relation to later reading outcomes. Three subgroups of lexical growth were classified, namely high-high (with a large initial vocabulary size and a fast growth rate), low-high (with a small initial vocabulary size and a fast growth rate) and low-low (with a small initial vocabulary size and a slow growth rate) groups. Low-high and low-low groups were distinguishable mostly through phonological skills, morphological skills and other reading-related cognitive skills. Childhood vocabulary development (using intercept and slope) explained subsequent reading skills. Findings suggest that language-related and reading-related cognitive skills differ among groups with different developmental trajectories of vocabulary, and the initial size and growth rate of vocabulary may be two predictors for later reading development.

The present study explored the early predictors of reading comprehension difficulties in Chinese children. We originally recruited 290 Beijing and 154 Hong Kong children and further selected from each sample those (30 from Beijing and 22 from Hong Kong sample) in the lowest 25 % on reading comprehension tests across the last two consecutive testing years (Beijing: ages 9 and 10; Hong Kong: ages 8 and 9) as poor comprehenders. These groups were matched to a group of children from the same sample whose reading comprehension was above 30 % across the two final years and matched on mothers’ education levels, age, nonverbal reasoning at age 4, and Chinese word reading across the same final two consecutive years. We then examined early linguistic/cognitive skills at ages 5–9 that could distinguish the poor and typically developing groups in each city separately. Compared to the control group, poor comprehenders from both samples performed significantly and consistently worse on word reading at early ages, and generally worse on morphological compounding awareness, phonological awareness, and vocabulary knowledge from ages 6 and onwards. In addition, lexical tone sensitivity across ages and grammatical sensitivity (administered at age 5 only) failed to distinguish the two groups for the Beijing sample but did for Hong Kong children.

Children’s literacy development forms the foundation for lifelong learning. Acquisition of reading and writing skills involves crucial aspects of both cognitive and psychosocial development. This book critically analyses research and theory on literacy acquisition from an ecological perspective.