Abstract
The present study investigated the relationship between Chinese reading skills and metalinguistic awareness skills such as phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness for 101 Preschool, 94 Grade-1, 98 Grade-2, and 98 Grade-3 children from two primary schools in Mainland China. The aim of the study was to examine how each of these metalinguistic awareness skills would exert their influence on the success of reading in Chinese with age. The results showed that all three metalinguistic awareness skills significantly predicted reading success. It further revealed that orthographic awareness played a dominant role in the early stages of reading acquisition, and its influence decreased with age, while the opposite was true for the contribution of morphological awareness. The results were in stark contrast with studies in English, where phonological awareness is typically shown as the single most potent metalinguistic awareness factor in literacy acquisition. In order to account for the current data, a three-stage model of reading acquisition in Chinese is discussed.
Highlights
Children typically develop literacy skills in literate societies with appropriate education
It further revealed that orthographic awareness played a dominant role in the early stages of reading acquisition, and its influence decreased with age, while the opposite was true for the contribution of morphological awareness
Participants 411 children from two primary schools in Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province participated in the study. 20 children were excluded from the analyses due to their incomplete data
Summary
Children typically develop literacy skills in literate societies with appropriate education. Many distinct cognitive psychological factors play key roles in reading development, such as, metalinguistic awareness [2], executive function [3], grammatical skills [4], naming speed [5], [6] and so on. The relationships between these factors and literacy acquisition vary across different languages. Non-alphabetic languages such as Chinese with a deep orthography show differences in the way these cognitive psychological processes interact with each other in reading and in the acquisition of literacy when compared with alphabetic languages such as English which is considered to have a deep orthography [7,8,9].
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