Reading Difficulties In Chinese Research Articles

What Predicts First‐ and Second‐Language Difficulties? Testing Language and Executive Functioning Skills as Correlates

AbstractThis study examined the co‐occurrence of word reading difficulty in Chinese (L1) and English as a second language (L2) and tested language and executive functioning (EF) skills as correlates. Thirty‐nine poor readers in Chinese (PC), 39 poor readers in English (PE), and 26 poor readers of both languages (PB) were compared to 39 average readers who served as controls (C). The co‐occurrence rate of L1–L2 difficulty was 40%. Moreover, PC, PE, and PB performed less well than C on all language and EF skills; PB performed less well than PC, PE, and C on L1 and L2 phonological awareness, L2 morphological awareness, rapid naming, and EF. Findings highlight the role of language and EF skills in L1 and L2 reading development.

Perceptual span is independent of font size for older and young readers: Evidence from Chinese.

Research suggests that visual acuity plays a more important role in parafoveal processing in Chinese reading than in spaced alphabetic languages, such that in Chinese, as the font size increases, the size of the perceptual span decreases. The lack of spaces and the complexity of written Chinese may make characters in eccentric positions particularly hard to process. Older adults generally have poorer visual capabilities than young adults, particularly in parafoveal vision, and so may find large characters in the parafovea particularly hard to process compared with smaller characters because of their greater eccentricity. Therefore, the effect of font size on the perceptual span may be larger for older readers. Crucially, this possibility has not previously been investigated; however, this may represent a unique source of age-related reading difficulty in logographic languages. Accordingly, to explore the relationship between font size and parafoveal processing for both older and young adult readers, we manipulated font size and the amount of parafoveal information available with different masking stimuli in 2 silent-reading experiments. The results show that decreasing the font size disrupted reading behavior more for older readers, such that reading times were longer for smaller characters, but crucially, the influence of font size on the perceptual span was absent for both age groups. These findings provide new insight into age-related reading difficulty in Chinese by revealing that older adults can successfully process substantial parafoveal information across a range of font sizes. This indicates that older adults' parafoveal processing may be more robust than previously considered. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Whole-Brain Functional Networks for Phonological and Orthographic Processing in Chinese Good and Poor Readers.

The neural basis of dyslexia in different languages remains unresolved, and it is unclear whether the phonological deficit as the core deficit of dyslexia is language-specific or universal. The current functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study using whole-brain data-driven network analyses investigated the neural mechanisms for phonological and orthographic processing in Chinese children with good and poor reading ability. Sixteen good readers and 16 poor readers were requested to make homophone judgments (phonological processing) and component judgments (visual-orthographic processing) of presented Chinese characters. Poor readers displayed worse performance than the good readers in phonological processing, but not in orthographic processing. Whole-brain activation analyses showed compensatory activations in the poor readers during phonological processing and automatic phonological production activation in the good readers during orthographic processing. Significant group differences in the topological properties of their brain networks were found only in orthographic processing. Analyses of nodal degree centrality and betweenness centrality revealed significant group differences in both phonological and orthographic processing. The present study supports the phonological core deficit hypothesis of reading difficulty in Chinese. It also suggests that Chinese good and poor readers might recruit different strategies and neural mechanisms for orthographic processing.

What aspects of the home literacy environment differentiate Chinese children at risk for reading difficulties from their not at risk controls?

We examined what aspects of the home literacy environment (formal home literacy activities, informal home literacy activities, access to literacy resources, age of onset of literacy instruction, child’s interest in reading, and parents’ expectations) differentiate Chinese children at risk for reading difficulties from their not-at-risk controls. Eighteen children from Jining, China, who were at risk for reading difficulties and 32 not-at-risk controls participated in the study. Their parents also participated in the study by filling out a home literacy questionnaire, by recording the daily parent-child reading activities (diary), and by completing the Children’s Title Recognition Checklist. Group comparisons revealed significant differences only in items measuring children’s access to literacy resources and reading interest. Results of discriminant function analyses further showed that the home literacy environment variables could discriminate well between the children at risk for reading difficulties and their controls. Taken together, our findings suggest that to the extent environment plays a role in reading difficulties in Chinese, this should be traced to factors such as child’s interest in reading and access to literacy resources.

Auditory identification of frequency-modulated sweeps and reading difficulties in Chinese

BackgroundIn Chinese Mandarin, lexical tones play an important role of providing contrasts in word meaning. They are pitch patterns expressed by frequency-modulated (FM) signals. Yet, few studies have looked at the relationship between low-level auditory processing of frequency signals and Chinese reading skills. AimsThe study aims to identify the role of auditory frequency processing in Chinese lexical tone awareness as well as character recognition in Chinese-speaking children. MethodsChildren with (N = 28) and without (N = 27) developmental dyslexia (DD) were recruited. All participants completed two linguistic tasks, Chinese character recognition and lexical tone awareness, and two auditory frequency processing tasks, frequency discrimination and FM sweep direction identification. ResultsThe results revealed that Chinese-speaking children with DD were significantly poorer at all tasks. Particularly, Chinese character recognition was significantly related to FM sweep identification. Lexical tone awareness was significantly associated with both auditory frequency processing tasks. Regression analyses suggested the influence of FM sweep identification on Chinese character recognition contributed through lexical tone awareness. Conclusions and implicationThis study suggests that poor auditory frequency processing may associate with Chinese developmental dyslexia with phonological deficits. In support of the phonological deficit hypothesis, what underlies phonological deficit is likely to be auditory-basis. A potential clinical implication is to reinforce auditory perception and sensitivity through intervention for phonological processing.

Beyond Auditory Sensory Processing Deficits: Lexical Tone Perception Deficits in Chinese Children With Developmental Dyslexia

Increasing evidence suggests that children with developmental dyslexia exhibit a deficit not only at the segmental level of phonological processing but also, by extension, at the suprasegmental level. However, it remains unclear whether such a suprasegmental phonological processing deficit is due to a difficulty in processing acoustic cues of speech rhythm, such as rise time and intensity. This study set out to investigate to what extent suprasegmental phonological processing (i.e., Cantonese lexical tone perception) and rise time sensitivity could distinguish Chinese children with dyslexia from typically developing children. Sixteen children with dyslexia and 44 age-matched controls were administered a Cantonese lexical tone perception task, psychoacoustic tasks, a nonverbal reasoning ability task, and word reading and dictation tasks. Children with dyslexia performed worse than controls on Cantonese lexical tone perception, rise time, and intensity. Furthermore, Cantonese lexical tone perception appeared to be a stable indicator that distinguishes children with dyslexia from controls, even after controlling for basic auditory processing skills. These findings suggest that suprasegmental phonological processing (i.e., lexical tone perception) is a potential factor that accounts for reading difficulty in Chinese.

Neural signatures of phonological deficits in Chinese developmental dyslexia

There has been debate on whether phonological deficits explain reading difficulty in Chinese, since Chinese is a logographic language which does not employ grapheme-phoneme-correspondence rules and remote memorization seems to be the main method to acquire reading. In the current study, we present neuroimaging evidence that the phonological deficit is also a signature of Chinese dyslexia. Specifically, we found that Chinese children with dyslexia (DD) showed reduced brain activation in the left dorsal inferior frontal gyrus (dIFG) when compared to both age-matched controls (AC) and reading-matched controls (RC) during an auditory rhyming judgment task. This suggests that the phonological processing deficit in this region may be a signature of dyslexia in Chinese, rather than a difference due to task performance or reading ability, which was matched on DD and RC. At exactly the same region of the left dIFG, we found a positive correlation between brain activation and reading skill in DD, suggesting that the phonological deficit is associated with the severity of dyslexia. We also found increased brain activation in the right precentral gyrus in DD than both AC and RC, suggesting a compensation of reliance on articulation. Functional connectivity analyses revealed that DD had a weaker connection between the left superior temporal gyrus (STG) and fusiform gyrus (FG) than the two control groups, suggesting that the reduced connection between phonology and orthography is another neural signature of dyslexia. In contrast, DD showed greater connectivity between the left dIFG and the left inferior parietal lobule (IPL) than both control groups, suggesting a reduced segregation between the language network and default mode network in dyslexic children. We also found that connectivity between the left STG and the left dIFG was sensitive to task performance and/or reading skill rather than being dyslexic or not, because AC was greater than both RC and DD, while the connectivity between the left middle occipital gyrus (MOG) and left STG was sensitive to age, because both AC and DD were greater than RC. In summary, our study provides the very first neurological evidence of phonological deficits in Chinese developmental dyslexia and we successfully distinguished variations of brain activity/functional connectivity due to age, performance, and dyslexia by comparing AC, RC, and DD.

Specific Reading Difficulties in Chinese, English, or Both

What are the longitudinal cognitive profiles of Hong Kong Chinese children with specific reading difficulties in Chinese only, in English only, or both? A total of 16 poor readers each of Chinese (PC) and English (PE) and 8 poor readers of both orthographies (PB) were compared to a control sample (C) of 16 children; all were drawn from a statistically representative sample of 154 Hong Kong Chinese children tested at ages 5 to 9 years. PE and PB children’s mothers had lower education levels than did the other groups. With children’s ages and mothers’ education levels statistically controlled, the PE, PC, and PB groups were significantly lower than the C group on phonological awareness. The PB and PE groups also scored significantly lower than the others on English vocabulary across years, whereas the PC and PB groups were significantly poorer than the C and PE groups on morphological awareness across years. Finally, the PB group was significantly slower than the other groups on speed naming at every age tested, underscoring the potential importance of automaticity in reading across orthographies. Findings highlight the need to consider the issue of how to identify reading difficulties in a second language.

Cognitive profiles of chinese adolescents with dyslexia

The present study sought to identify cognitive abilities that might distinguish Hong Kong Chinese adolescents with and without dyslexia and examined the cognitive profile of dyslexic adolescents in order to better understand this important problem. The performance of 27 Chinese adolescents with childhood diagnoses of dyslexia was compared with 27 adolescents of the same chronological age (CA) and 27 of matched reading level (RL) on measures of literacy and cognitive abilities: Chinese word reading, one-minute reading, reading comprehension, dictation, verbal short-term memory, rapid naming, visual-orthographic knowledge, morphological and phonological awareness. The results indicated that the dyslexic group scored lower than the CA group, but similar to the RL group, especially in the areas of rapid naming, visual-orthographic knowledge and morphological awareness, with over half having multiple deficits exhibited 2 or more cognitive areas. Furthermore, the number of cognitive deficits was associated with the degree of reading and spelling impairment. These findings suggest that adolescents with childhood diagnoses of dyslexia have persistent literacy difficulties and seem to have multiple causes for reading difficulties in Chinese.

Brain-behavior relations in reading and dyslexia: Implications of Chinese results

It is ironic that our recent report on the neural correlatesof Chinese dyslexia (Siok, Perfetti, Jin, & Tan, 2004) raisesa concern by Ziegler (2006) that this report could under-mine an agreed-upon conclusion favoring a phonologicaldeficit as the cause of reading disability. Our past researchover 20 years in English (Perfetti, 1985) and Chinese (Per-fetti, Liu, & Tan, 2005; Pollatsek, Tan, & Rayner, 2000;Tan & Perfetti, 1998) has argued that phonological pro-cesses are intrinsic to word reading and universal acrosswriting systems, and we certainly have no reason to mini-mize the importance of these processes for understandingreading disability. We address Ziegler’s concern by makingtwo observations. (1) The Siok et al. evidence supporting arole for the left middle frontal gyrus (LMFG) instead ofthe left posterior temporoparietal regions found in alpha-betic research does not undermine the consensus on theuniversality of phonology. Instead this evidence shows thatthe implementation of phonology depends on language andwriting systems, a conclusion also reached through behav-ioral evidence (Perfetti et al., 2005). (2) The detailed neuralbasis of dyslexia remains an open question, rather thanaccepted wisdom.On the first point, Siok et al. did not conclude that pho-nology plays no role in Chinese reading disability and Zie-gler’s critique recognizes this. Indeed, the evidence in favorof a phonological basis for dyslexia in alphabetic writinghas accumulated impressively over 20 years, from a timeat which the prevailing views emphasized visual problemsas the cause of dyslexia. This evidence comes from neuro-biological (Brunswick, McCrory, Price, Frith, & Frith,1999; Eden et al., 2004; Price & Mechelli, 2005; Richards,Aylward, & Berninger, 2006; Shaywitz et al., 1998; Templeet al., 2003), cognitive (Bruck, 1992; Schatschneider,Fletcher, Francis, Carlson, & Foorman, 2004; Stanovich& Siegel, 1994; Vellutino, Fletcher, Snowling, & Scanlon,2004), and genetic perspectives (Taipale et al., 2003). Themore biologically specific form of the phonological hypoth-esis is that dyslexia is universally associated with functionaldisruption of the left temporoparietal brain regions(Paulesu et al., 2001). It is this hypothesis that is falsifiedby Siok et al. (2004).To summarize briefly, using homophone and lexicaldecision tasks, we found that reading difficulty in Chi-nese is associated not only with a weakness in mappingof a character’s orthography to pronunciation (as mea-sured by the homophone decision task), but also witha substandard connection between orthography andmeaning (as indexed by the lexical decision paradigm).Importantly, these two deficits were characterized by dys-function of the left middle frontal gyrus. The left tempo-roparietal brain regions associated with disabled readingin English and other alphabets were not involved in thereading of Chinese children. Thus, either Chinese readingdisability does not have a phonological component orthe phonological component in Chinese does not involvethe left temporoparietal regions. Because the Siok et al.behavioral data showed weakness in phonological pro-cessing, the conclusion is that this weakness is associatedwith some other neural substrate. The left middle frontalgyrus, which was under activated in Chinese dyslexics, isa likely candidate.However, this is not the end of the story, but the begin-ning. The research goal becomes to understand the func-tion of the LMFG in reading. It is not obvious that theLMFG, whatever its more general role in cognitive func-

Do Chinese Dyslexic Children Have Difficulties Learning English as a Second Language?

The aim of the present study was to examine whether Chinese dyslexic children had difficulties learning English as a second language given the distinctive characteristics of the two scripts. Twenty-five Chinese primary school children with developmental dyslexia and 25 normally achieving children were tested on a number of English vocabulary, reading, and phonological processing tasks. It was found that the Dyslexia group performed significantly worse than the Control group in nearly all the English measures. The findings suggest that Chinese dyslexic children also encounter difficulties in learning English as a second language, and they are generally weak in phonological processing both in Chinese and English. However, phonological skills were found to correlate significantly with English reading but not with Chinese reading in the dyslexic children. It is evident that there are both common and specific causes to reading difficulties in Chinese and English.