Developmental Changes in the Relationship Between Character Reading Ability and Orthographic Awareness in Chinese.

Dan Lin,Yingyi Liu,Hong Li,Jianhong Mo

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02397

Abstract

The present study examined developmental changes, over a 6-year period, in the relationship between character reading ability and orthographic awareness in Chinese from the first year of kindergarten to the third year of primary school in two separate samples: the kindergarten sample of 96 children was assessed three times in the first, second, and third years of kindergarten (K1, K2, K3) with 12-month intervals. The primary school sample of 204 children was assessed four times in the first and second semesters of grade 1 (P1-S1; P1-S2), first semester of grade 2 (P2-S1) and grade 3 (P3-S1), with the first three waves at 6-month intervals and the final wave at 12-month interval. Cross-lagged path analysis showed three developmental stages of the relationship between Chinese character reading and orthographic awareness. At stage 1, reading ability in K1 and K2 predicted subsequent orthographic awareness in K2 and K3. At stage 2, there was a bidirectional relationship between character reading and orthographic awareness from P1-S1 to P1-S2. At stage 3, orthographic awareness at P1-S2 and P2-S1 predicted subsequent character reading ability at P2-S1 and P3-S1, but the prediction from reading to orthographic awareness vanished at this stage. The results depict a full developmental picture of the changed relationship between Chinese character reading and orthographic awareness over time. Beginning readers demonstrated impressive abilities in discovering or extracting orthographic regularities with increased reading ability.

Highlights

Reading is a developmental continuum rather than an all-or-none phenomenon (Teale and Sulzby, 1986)
Children performed on orthographic awareness significantly better than chance level at each time point in both the kindergarten and primary school samples
The positional knowledge and semantic radical function were correlated at a relatively low level, conceptually it is meaningful to have both positional knowledge and semantic radical function being taken into account in considering the general orthographic awareness

Summary

Introduction

Reading is a developmental continuum rather than an all-or-none phenomenon (Teale and Sulzby, 1986). Emergent literacy skills of preliterate children are developmental precursors of conventional reading and writing, such as orthographic awareness. Orthographic awareness refers to the understanding of the print conventions or knowledge of word spelling (Conrad et al, 2013). Castles and Nation (2006) defined orthographic awareness as the sensitivity to orthographic regularities/rules in the script, which constrains the arrangement of the ordering of the internal structures. Studies in alphabetic languages have indicated that orthographic awareness at early stages is a strong predictor of subsequent reading acquisition (Badian, 2001; Boets et al, 2008). An increasing number of studies have identified the feature of orthographic

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Discussion

Conclusion