Cognitive Correlates of Reading Fluency in Chinese School-Aged Children.

Jing Bai,Wenlong Li,Wei He,Jianhui Wu,Min Xu,Yang Yang

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00903

Abstract

Previous studies have showed that reading fluency is strongly associated with cognitive skills, including rapid automatized naming, phonological awareness, orthographical awareness, and so on. However, these studies are largely based on alphabetic languages, and it remains unclear which cognitive factors contribute to the development of reading fluency in logographic Chinese, a language in which the graphic forms map onto morphemes (meaning) rather than phonemes. In Study 1, we tested 179 Chinese children aged 6 to 9 on a set of cognitive tasks as well as for word reading accuracy and sentence reading fluency. The results showed that rapid naming, writing fluency, and phonological awareness significantly predicted reading fluency in both beginning and intermediate readers. In addition, while the contribution of rapid naming and writing fluency increased with grades, the effect of phonological awareness decreased. In Study 2, we examined the role of visual crowding in reading fluency in a subgroup of 86 children and found that visual crowding accounted for the unique variance of individual differences in reading fluency. The findings reflect both universal and language-specific cognitive correlates of reading fluency and provide important implications for potentially effective treatment for individuals suffering from Chinese reading disabilities, particularly in terms of reading fluency.

Highlights

Reading fluency, the ability to read rapidly and automatically, is considered a key to good reading comprehension (Nathan and Stanovich, 1991; Hudson et al, 2005; Katzir et al, 2006; Palmer, 2010)
The current study extended previous findings and tested which cognitive factors accounted for individual differences in reading fluency in logographic Chinese
Our results generally indicated a greater importance for lexical cognitive factors in Chinese reading fluency than for cognitive capacities such as working memory and executive control

Summary

Introduction

The ability to read rapidly and automatically, is considered a key to good reading comprehension (Nathan and Stanovich, 1991; Hudson et al, 2005; Katzir et al, 2006; Palmer, 2010). While good readers are able to recognize words efficiently and automatically and devote most of their cognitive resources to comprehending the text, poor readers tend to read in a labored, disconnected way, with most of their cognitive capacity focused on decoding at the word level (Perfetti, 1985; Hudson et al, 2005). Achieving reading fluency involves the efficient integration of information from different levels of language processing (including orthographic, phonological, semantic, and syntactic processes) with both great accuracy and speed (Norton and Wolf, 2012). Evidence has accumulated to indicate that reading fluency is strongly associated with a complex system of cognitive skills, including rapid automatized naming (RAN) (Savage and Frederickson, 2005; Norton and Wolf, 2012; Georgiou et al, 2016; Strappini et al, 2017), phonological skills (Poulsen and Elbro, 2013; Kibby et al, 2014; Elhassan et al, 2017), orthographic skills (O’Brien et al, 2011; Ehri, 2013), and so on

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Results

Conclusion