Predictors of reading in children with Chinese as a first language: a developmental and cross-linguistic perspective

Abstract

Measures of phonological and morphological awareness of Chinese were administered to 94 third-grade students of Chinese in Taiwan to evaluate their relative contributions to current and prospective prediction of early reading in Chinese L1 and English L2. Phonological awareness made a significant unique contribution to Chinese character reading concurrently at grade 3 and subsequently at grade 5 beyond controls and morphological awareness. Morphological awareness contributed no additional unique variance to character reading at grade 3 beyond phonological awareness, but became significant at grade 5 beyond phonological awareness and the autoregressor. Phonological and morphological awareness of Chinese also predicted unique variance in English word reading at grades 3 and 5, though only phonological awareness remained significant at grade 5 beyond the autoregressor. These results suggest that phonological and morphological awareness differs in their relative importance at different stages of learning to read different scripts among children in Taiwan, but their effects in reading are persistent longitudinally and pervasive cross-linguistically.