Abstract
While previous studies have shown that the impact of phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) on dyslexia depends on orthographic complexity in alphabetic languages, it remains unclear whether this relationship generalizes to the more complex orthography of Chinese. We investigated the predictive power of PA, RAN, and morphological awareness (MA) in dyslexia diagnosis status in a sample of 241 typically developing and 223 dyslexic Chinese-speaking children. Compared with the control group, children with dyslexia performed notably worse on character reading and all three cognitive measures. A logistic regression analysis showed that PA and RAN were both significant predictors, while MA also played a relatively important role for predicting dyslexia status in Chinese children. In the next step, we used multigroup analyses to test if these three cognitive predictors were of the same importance in predicting reading variance in different reading proficiency groups. And the results showed that the regression coefficient of MP is stronger for the control group than the dyslexia group, while the regression coefficient of PD tends to be stronger for the dyslexic group. Further cluster analysis identified four subtypes of dyslexia in this sample: a global deficit group, a phonological deficit group, a RAN deficit group, and a mild morphological deficit group. Our findings are largely consistent with previous studies of predictors of dyslexia, while uniquely demonstrating the differences in predictive power of these three cognitive variables on reading, as well as the unique contribution of MA in Chinese reading.
Highlights
Developmental dyslexia is a specific disorder characterized by dysfluent or inaccurate word recognition that is not attributable to sensory deficit, insufficient education, or low IQ (Ramus et al, 2003)
Compared with control group children, children with dyslexia performed notably worse on the character reading task (CR: 0.33 vs. – 2.45)
To the findings for alphabetic languages (Landerl et al, 2013; Moll et al, 2014), our results showed that deficits in phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) tests were both strong predictors of dyslexia status
Summary
Developmental dyslexia is a specific disorder characterized by dysfluent or inaccurate word recognition that is not attributable to sensory deficit, insufficient education, or low IQ (Ramus et al, 2003). Research on predictors of dyslexia and poor reading in Chinese children has reported that both PA (McBride-Chang et al, 2011; Xue et al, 2013) and RAN (Ho et al, 2004; Pan et al, 2011) are strongly associated with children’s reading variations, and dyslexic children were observed as having significant deficits in PA and/or RAN (Shu et al, 2006; Chung et al, 2011). With the same case-control design and data-driven logistic regression analyses as used as in Landerl et al (2013) research, the current study aimed to test whether these preliteracy cognitive areas of PA, RAN, and MA are important predictors in a large sample of Chinese children (n = 464), and whether these cognitive variables are contributing differently in predicting reading between dyslexia and normal developing children. The second goal was to identify specific dyslexic subtypes in the Chinese language based on an investigation of the three above-mentioned cognitive domains
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