Abstract
This study investigated the role of morphological awareness in understanding Chinese word reading and dictation among Chinese-speaking adolescent readers in Hong Kong as well as the cognitive-linguistic profile of early adolescent readers with dyslexia. Fifty-four readers with dyslexia in Grades 5 and 6 were compared with 54 chronological age-matched (CA) typical readers on the following measures of cognitive-linguistic and literacy skills: morphological awareness, phonological awareness, visual-orthographic knowledge, rapid naming, vocabulary knowledge, verbal short-term memory (STM), Chinese word reading, and dictation (or spelling). The results indicated that early adolescent readers with dyslexia performed less well than the typical readers on all cognitive-linguistic and literacy measures except the phonological measures. Both groups' scores showed substantial correlations between morphological awareness and Chinese word reading and dictation. Visual-orthographic knowledge and rapid naming were also associated with dictation in early adolescent readers with and without dyslexia, respectively. Moderated multiple regression analyses further revealed that morphological awareness and rapid naming explained unique variance in word reading and dictation for the readers with dyslexia and typical readers separately after controlling readers' age and group effect. These results highlight the potential importance of morphological awareness and rapid naming in Chinese word reading and writing in Chinese early adolescents' literacy development and impairment.
Highlights
Developmental dyslexia, referred to as reading disability, is a disorder characterized by severe and often pervasive difficulty in learning to read and spell despite normal intelligence and in the absence of sensory and neurological impairment or environmental deprivation (Lyon et al, 2003; Rose, 2009)
The present study investigated the potential key role of morphological awareness in enhancing literacy development and impairment in early adolescent Chinese readers, as well as the extent to which the cognitive-linguistic profile of readers with dyslexia differed from typically developing readers in Hong Kong
Our results provide data that add to the body of research evidence highlighting the potential importance of morphological awareness in literacy development and impairment (e.g., Carlisle, 1995), especially in early adolescent Chinese readers (Shu et al, 2006)
Summary
Developmental dyslexia, referred to as reading disability, is a disorder characterized by severe and often pervasive difficulty in learning to read and spell despite normal intelligence and in the absence of sensory and neurological impairment or environmental deprivation (Lyon et al, 2003; Rose, 2009). Dyslexia in Adolescent Chinese Readers in relation to other cognitive-linguistic skills could be of particular importance in enhancing the understanding of reading development and impairment in Chinese (e.g., McBride-Chang et al, 2003; Shu et al, 2006). The present study seeks to extend this work by investigating the development of cognitivelinguistic skills associated with both reading and spelling abilities during the transition from childhood to early adolescence among Chinese students with dyslexia. We drew on previous work to look at six cognitive-linguistic skills associated with both reading and writing ability in dyslexia across alphabetic and non-alphabetic languages, namely, morphological awareness, rapid naming, visual orthographic knowledge, verbal short-term memory (STM), phonological awareness and vocabulary skills (e.g., Ho et al, 2002; de Jong and van der Leij, 2003; Shu et al, 2006). To be examined, are the cognitive-linguistic skills that might distinguish Chinese early adolescent readers with and without dyslexia in Grades 5 and 6, as well as the relations among the six cognitive-linguistic skills, word reading and dictation in readers with and without dyslexia
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