Abstract

Reading disorders (RD) are common and complex neuropsychological conditions associated with decoding printed words and/or reading comprehension. Early identification of children at risk of RD is critical to allow timely interventions before mental suffering and reading impairment take place. Chinese is a unique medium for studying RD because of extra efforts required in reading acquisition of characters based on meaning rather than phonology. Pinyin, an alphabetic coding system mapping Mandarin sounds to characters, is important to develop oral language skills and a promising candidate for early screening for RD. In this pilot study, we used a cohort of 100 students (50 each in Grades 1 and 2) to derive novel profiles of applying Pinyin to identify early schoolers at risk of RD. Each student had comprehensive reading related measures in two consecutive years, including Pinyin reading and reading comprehension tested in the first and second year, respectively. We showed that Pinyin reading was mainly determined by phonological awareness, was well developed in Grade 1 and the top predictor of reading comprehension (explaining ∼30% of variance, p < 1.0e-05). Further, students who performed poorly in Pinyin reading [e.g. 1 standard deviation (SD) below the average, counting 14% in Grade 1 and 10% in Grade 2], tended to perform poorly in future reading comprehension tests, including all four individuals in Grade 1 (two out of three in Grade 2) who scored 1.5 SDs below the average. Pinyin is therefore an effective proxy for early screening for Mandarin-speaking children at risk of RD.

Highlights

  • Reading disorders (RD) are conditions occurring in learning to decode printed words and/or in learning to comprehend text (Cutting et al, 2013; Hulme and Snowling, 2016; Snowling et al, 2019)

  • Pinyin reading was strongly correlated with almost every reading related measure in Grade 1, and the correlations remained strong in Grade 2 except for those with the morphological awareness (MA) measures, indicating a great potential of Pinyin for early screening for RD in school students

  • Most phonological awareness (PA) measures were strongly correlated with other measures relatively consistently across grades, whereas the correlations between the MA and the rapid automatized naming (RAN) measures were generally weak/moderate (Supplementary Figure 1)

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Summary

Introduction

Reading disorders (RD) are conditions occurring in learning to decode printed words (i.e. developmental dyslexia) and/or in learning to comprehend text (i.e. reading comprehension impairment) (Cutting et al, 2013; Hulme and Snowling, 2016; Snowling et al, 2019). Deciphering RD has Pinyin Early Screening for Dyslexia been a long-standing challenge for over a century (Anderson and Meier-Hedde, 2001; Peterson and Pennington, 2015; Stein, 2018). This is largely owing to the high complexities in RD and the lack of coherent definitions across disciplines (Snowling, 2012; Snowling and Hulme, 2012; Stein, 2018). While mounting evidence indicate multiple causal links with RD, further work is required to validate these hypothesized links (Gori et al, 2016; Facoetti et al, 2019)

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