Reading strategy in Hong Kong school-aged children: development of word- and character-level processing

Abstract

This study investigated the developmental trend of reading processing of Chinese two-character compound words in normal primary school-aged readers in Hong Kong. As the component characters of a Chinese multi-character compound word could be viewed as single morphemes, it was hypothesized that a compound word could be read as a meaningful whole, its component characters, or both. Previous studies (Zhang and Peng, 1992; Peng et al., 1999; etc.) showed that adults used both whole-word-level and character-level processing for reading Chinese multi-character words and there were interaction effects between word and component character frequencies. In the present study, subjects were asked to read aloud two-character words that were controlled for word and component character frequencies according to grades. The results suggested that word-level and component-character-level reading processing were developed in children as early as grade one. Lower graders tended to use the component-character-level reading processing when reading Chinese compound words, while higher graders tended to read words as whole units.