Dialogic reading and morphology training in Chinese children: Effects on language and literacy.

This study investigates the effects of parent-child shared book reading and metalinguistic training on the language and literacy skills of 148 kindergartners in Hong Kong. Children were pretested on Chinese character recognition, vocabulary, morphological awareness, and reading interest and then assigned randomly to 1 of 4 conditions: the dialogic reading with morphology training (DR + MT), dialogic reading (DR), typical reading, or control condition. After a 12-week intervention period, the DR intervention yielded greater gains in vocabulary, and the DR + MT intervention yielded greater improvement in character recognition and morphological awareness. Both interventions enhanced children's reading interest. Results confirm that different home literacy approaches influence children's oral and written language skills differently: Shared book reading promotes language development, whereas parents' explicit metalinguistic training within a shared book reading context better prepares children for learning to read. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Developmental issues in Chinese children's character acquisition.

Measures of phonological processing, speech perception, and Chinese character recognition were administered to 109 Hong Kong Chinese 3- and 4-year-olds. A model predicting phonological awareness from vocabulary, verbal short-term memory, and speech perception was supported. Both phonological awareness and letter naming predicted unique variance in character recognition after controlling for other phonological processing and vocabulary skills, similar to previous studies of Western readers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Harsh Parenting in Relation to Child Emotion Regulation and Aggression.

This study presents a model of harsh parenting that has an indirect effect, as well as a direct effect, on child aggression in the school environment through the mediating process of child emotion regulation. Tested on a sample of 325 Chinese children and their parents, the model showed adequate goodness of fit. Also investigated were interaction effects between parents' and children's gender. Mothers' harsh parenting affected child emotion regulation more strongly than fathers', whereas harsh parenting emanating from fathers had a stronger effect on child aggression. Fathers' harsh parenting also affected sons more than daughters, whereas there was no gender differential effect with mothers' harsh parenting. These results are discussed with an emphasis on negative emotionality as a potentially common cause of family perturbations, including parenting and child adjustment problems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonological Processing Skills and Early Reading Abilities in Hong Kong Chinese Kindergarteners Learning to Read English as a Second Language.

The present 9-month longitudinal study investigated relations between Chinese native language phonological processing skills and early Chinese and English reading abilities among 227 kindergarteners in Hong Kong. Phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and short-term verbal memory differed in their relations to concurrent and subsequent Chinese and English word recognition. The significant bidirectional relations between phonological awareness and Chinese reading ability remained even after accounting for the variance due to age, vocabulary, and visual skills performance. When all predictors were considered simultaneously, only phonological awareness remained a significant predictor of Chinese and English reading abilities both concurrently and longitudinally. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Growth modeling of phonological awareness.

In a longitudinal study following prereading kindergartners through first grade, the variables verbal memory, IQ, and speech perception (SP) together predicted 26% of growth in and 42% of the final status of phonological awareness (PA). The correlation between initial status and growth in PA was .51, suggesting that those who begin with high PA develop that skill more quickly than those who begin with lower PA. Although those low and high in SP in kindergarten had substantially different word-decoding scores by the middle of first grade (low: M?=?6.8 words; high: M?=?18.1 words), this difference was no longer significant once phonological processing was controlled, suggesting that the effect of SP on word decoding is mediated by phonological processing ability. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What is morphological awareness? Tapping lexical compounding awareness in Chinese third graders.

One hundred twenty-one third-grade Chinese children were assessed with a new morphological awareness task involving open-ended lexical compounding, in addition to completing other measures. With children's age, nonverbal intelligence, phonological awareness, and previously established measures of morphological awareness statistically controlled, this compounding production task significantly explained unique variance in both Chinese character reading and vocabulary knowledge. Within this new task, subordinate and coordinative structures were significantly easier to compound than were subject–predicate and verb–object structures. Moreover, novel compounds that made use of verb morphemes were more difficult to manipulate than were those that did not contain verbs. This newly developed task of compounding production may be optimal for tapping older children's morphological awareness in the form of lexical compounding, in both Chinese and possibly other languages. In addition, these results demonstrate that linguistic manipulations within tasks of morphological awareness can influence their difficulty levels. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Speech perception, metalinguistic awareness, reading, and vocabulary in Chinese–English bilingual children.

In this study, we examined the intercorrelations among speech perception, metalinguistic (i.e., phonological and morphological) awareness, word reading, and vocabulary in a 1st language (L1) and a 2nd language (L2). Results from 3 age groups of Chinese–English bilingual children showed that speech perception was more predictive of reading and vocabulary in the L1 than L2. While morphological awareness uniquely predicted reading and vocabulary in both languages, phonological awareness played such a role after we controlled for morphological awareness only in the L2, which was alphabetic. L1 speech perception and metalinguistic awareness predicted L2 word reading but not vocabulary, after we controlled for the corresponding L2 variables. Hence, there are both similarities and differences between the 2 languages in how the constructs are related. The differences are attributable to variations in language properties and learning contexts. Implications of the present results for an effective L2 learning program are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Morphological Awareness Uniquely Predicts Young Children's Chinese Character Recognition.

Two unique measures of morphological awareness, along with other reading-related tasks, were orally administered to 100 kindergarten and 100 2nd-grade Hong Kong Chinese children. These morphological awareness tasks were developed on the basis of 2 special properties of Chinese: (a) the relatively large number of homophones requires speakers to distinguish unique meanings in syllables with identical sounds, and (b) complex vocabulary words are often built from 2 or more previously learned morphemes. Both tasks of morphological awareness predicted unique variance in Chinese character recognition in these children, after controlling for age, phonological awareness, speeded naming, speed of processing, and vocabulary. Developmentally, both tasks of morphological awareness improved with age. Results demonstrate that morphological awareness is uniquely important for early Chinese character recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Developmental models of learning to read Chinese words.

What is the nature of learning to read Chinese across grade levels? This study tested 199 kindergartners, 172 second graders, and 165 fifth graders on 12 different tasks purportedly tapping constructs representing phonological awareness, morphological awareness, orthographic processing, and subcharacter processing. Confirmatory factor analyses comparing alternative models of these 4 constituents of Chinese word reading revealed different patterns of metalinguistic underpinnings of children's word recognition across grade levels: The best-fitting model for kindergartners represented a print–nonprint dichotomy of constructs. In contrast, 2nd graders showed a fine-grained sensitivity to all 4 hypothesized constructs. Finally, the best-fitting model for 5th graders consisted of a phonological sensitivity construct and a broad lexical morphological–orthographic processing construct. Findings suggest that Hong Kong Chinese children progress from a basic understanding of print versus nonprint to a diversified sensitivity to varied word-reading skills, to a focus on meaning-based word recognition, to the relative exclusion of phonological sensitivity in more advanced readers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)