Learning to See the Patterns in Chinese Characters

This study examined the role of phonological awareness and visual-orthographic skills in Chinese reading acquisition. The subjects were 154 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 5th graders in Beijing who had learned an alphabetic script known as Hanyu Pinyin to help read Chinese characters. Children's performance on tests of various cognitive skills, reading ability, and pinyin knowledge were examined. Results of hierarchical regression analyses showed that (a) visual skills predicted reading success at lower grades; (b) pinyin knowledge and the ability to discriminate homophonic characters predicted reading success in Grades 2, 3, and 5; and (c) onset-rime awareness, but not phonemic awareness, predicted Chinese reading. This suggests that learning to read Chinese progresses from a logographic phase to an orthographic-phonological phase and that the nature of phonological awareness predicting reading success is contingent on the characteristics of the writing system.

Measures of Chinese character/English word recognition, phonological awareness, speeded naming, visual-spatial skill, and processing speed were administered to 190 kindergarten students in Hong Kong and 128 kindergarten and grade 1 students in the United States. Across groups, the strongest predictor of reading itself was phonological awareness; visual processing did not predict reading. For both groups, speed of processing strongly predicted speeded naming, visual processing, and phonological awareness. Despite diversities of culture, language, and orthography to be learned, models of early reading development were remarkably similar across cultures and first and second language orthographies.