Contribution of discourse and morphosyntax skills to reading comprehension in Chinese dyslexic and typically developing children

This study aimed at identifying important skills for reading comprehension in Chinese dyslexic children and their typically developing counterparts matched on age (CA controls) or reading level (RL controls). The children were assessed on Chinese reading comprehension, cognitive, and reading-related skills. Results showed that the dyslexic children performed significantly less well than the CA controls but similarly to RL controls in most measures. Results of multiple regression analyses showed that word-level reading-related skills like oral vocabulary and word semantics were found to be strong predictors of reading comprehension among typically developing junior graders and dyslexic readers of senior grades, whereas morphosyntax, a text-level skill, was most predictive for typically developing senior graders. It was concluded that discourse and morphosyntax skills are particularly important for reading comprehension in the non-inflectional and topic-prominent Chinese system.     

Orthographic skills important to Chinese literacy development: the role of radical representation and orthographic memory of radicals

A 3-year longitudinal study among 239 Chinese students in Grades 2–4 was conducted to investigate the relationships between orthographic skills (including positional and functional knowledge of semantic radicals and phonetic radicals, and orthographic memory of radicals) and Chinese literacy skills (word reading, word spelling, reading comprehension and written composition). Phonetic radical knowledge was the only significant longitudinal predictor of word reading, whereas all orthographic skills examined were significant longitudinal predictors of word spelling. Reading comprehension was uniquely predicted by semantic radical knowledge. A model showing the relationships between orthographic skills and literacy skills was postulated.     

Reading and Spelling Chinese Among Beginning Readers: What Skills Make a Difference?

The contributions of six important reading-related skills (phonological awareness, rapid naming, orthographic skills, morphological awareness, listening comprehension, and syntactic skills) to Chinese word and text reading were examined among 290 Chinese first graders in Hong Kong. Rapid naming, but not phonological awareness, was a significant predictor of Chinese word reading and writing to dictation (i.e., spelling) in the context of orthographic skills and morphological awareness. Commonality analyses suggested that orthographic skills and morphological awareness each contributed significant amount of unique variance to Chinese word reading and spelling. Syntactic skills accounted for significant amount of unique variance in reading comprehension at both sentence and passage levels after controlling for the effects of word reading and the other skills, but listening comprehension did not. A model on the interrelationships among the reading-related skills and Chinese reading at both word and text levels was proposed.     

Syntactic skills in sentence reading comprehension among Chinese elementary school children

The present study examined the role of syntactic skills for reading comprehension in Chinese. Two hundred and seventy-two Chinese children were tested on their phonological processing, orthographic, morphological, syntactic, and literacy skills at Grades 1 and 2. Hierarchical multiple regression results showed that syntactic skills, in terms of word order, connective usage, and knowledge of morphosyntactic structure (measured by an oral cloze task) in Grade 1, significantly predicted sentence reading comprehension in Grade 2 after controlling for the children’s age, IQ, and word level reading-related cognitive skills in Grade 1, and word reading in Grade 2. As in alphabetic languages, syntactic skills are essential for reading comprehension in Chinese. The unique roles of individual syntactic skills for understanding sentences in Chinese are discussed.     

Writing motivation and performance in Chinese children

Reading and Writing - This study examined the relationships between writing motivation and written composition performance in Chinese among 388 Chinese children in Grades 3 to 5 in accordance with...