The role of phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and rapid automatized naming in the braille reading comprehension of Chinese blind children

Abstract

Reading comprehension is particularly important in blind children. The study investigated if morphological awareness, phonological awareness, and rapid automatized naming contributed to the sentence and text comprehension of Braille. 104 blind children in grades 3 to 4 and grades 5 to 6 were measured, children's working memory was entered together in the first step, in each regression analysis, while phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and rapid automatized naming were entered separately in the second, third, and final steps, to verify the distinctive role of these three factors in the sentence and text comprehension of Braille. Results showed that, in grades 3 to 4, this study found morphological awareness and phonological awareness contributed to blind children's sentence and text comprehension as controlling for working memory; the contribution of rapid automatized naming is not significant. In grades 5 to 6, rapid automatized naming was only a contributor to sentence and text comprehension of Braille, whereas both morphological awareness and phonological awareness had no significant contribution. The results implicated Chinese blind children's phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and rapid automatized naming had a potentially important role in Braille sentence and text comprehension.