Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-c47g7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T06:59:31.983Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Lexical tone awareness among Chinese children with developmental dyslexia*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 November 2010

WING-SZE LI  and
CONNIE SUK-HAN HO
WING-SZE LI
Affiliation:
University of Hong Kong
CONNIE SUK-HAN HO*
Affiliation:
University of Hong Kong
*
[*]Address for correspondence: Connie Suk-Han Ho, Department of Psychology, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong. tel: (852) 2241 5652; fax: (852) 2858 3518; e-mail: shhoc@hkucc.hku.hk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study examined the extent and nature of lexical tone deficit in Chinese developmental dyslexia. Twenty Cantonese-speaking Chinese dyslexic children (mean age 8 ; 11) were compared to twenty average readers of the same age (CA control group, mean age 8 ; 11), and another twenty younger average readers of the same word reading level (RL control group, mean age 7 ; 4) on different measures of lexical tone awareness, rhyme awareness and visual–verbal paired-associate learning. Results showed that the Chinese dyslexic children performed significantly worse than the CA but not the RL control groups in nearly all the lexical tone and rhyme awareness measures. Analyses of individual performance demonstrated that over one-third of the dyslexic children showed a deficit in some aspects of tone awareness. Tone discrimination and tone production were found to correlate significantly with Chinese word reading. These findings confirm that Chinese dyslexic children show weaknesses in tone awareness.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 38 , Issue 4 , September 2011 , pp. 793 - 808
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Bradley, L. & Bryant, P. (1978). Difficulties in auditory organization as a possible cause of reading backwardness. Nature 271, 746–47.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Chan, C. K. K. & Siegel, L. S. (2001). Phonological processing in reading Chinese among normally achieving and poor readers. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 80, 23–43.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Chen, X., Anderson, R. C., Li, W.-L., Hao, M.-L., Wu, X.-C. & Shu, H. (2004). Phonological awareness of bilingual and monolingual Chinese children. Journal of Educational Psychology 96, 142–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chow, B. W.-Y., McBride-Chang, C. & Burgess, S. (2005). Phonological processing skills and early reading abilities in Hong Kong Chinese kindergartners learning to read English as a second language. Journal of Educational Psychology 97(1), 81–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cutler, A. & Chen, H. C. (1997). Lexical tone in Cantonese spoken-word processing. Perception & Psychophysics 59, 165–79.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dinneen, F. P. (1967). An introduction to general linguistics. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.Google Scholar
Gottardo, A., Chiappe, P., Yan, B., Siegel, L. & Gu, Y. (2006). Relationships between first and second language phonological processing skills and reading in Chinese–English speakers living in English-speaking contexts. Educational Psychology 26, 367–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
He, Y.-Q., Wang, Q.-Y. & Anderson, R. C. (2005). Chinese children's use of subcharacter information about pronunciation. Journal of Educational Psychology 97, 572–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ho, C. S.-H. & Bryant, P. (1997a). Learning to read Chinese beyond the logographic phase. Reading Research Quarterly 32, 276–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ho, C. S.-H. & Bryant, P. (1997b). Phonological skills are important in learning to read Chinese. Developmental Psychology 33, 946–51.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ho, C. S.-H., Chan, D., Lee, S.-H., Tsang, S.-M. & Luan, V. H. (2004). Cognitive profiling and preliminary subtyping in Chinese developmental dyslexia. Cognition 91, 43–75.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ho, C. S.-H., Chan, D., Tsang, S.-M. & Lee, S.-H. (2000). The Hong Kong Test of Specific Learning Difficulties in Reading and Writing (HKT-SpLD). Hong Kong: Hong Kong Specific Learning Difficulties Research Team.Google Scholar
Ho, C. S.-H., Chan, D. W.-O., Tsang, S.-M. & Lee, S.-H. (2002). The cognitive profile and multiple-deficit hypothesis in Chinese developmental dyslexia. Developmental Psychology 38, 543–53.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ho, C. S.-H., Chan, D. W., Tsang, S.-M., Lee, S.-H. & Chung, K. K.-H. (2006). Word learning deficit among Chinese dyslexic children. Journal of Child Language 33, 145–61.Google ScholarPubMed
Ho, C. S.-H., Law, T. P.-S. & Ng, P. M. (2000). The phonological deficit hypothesis in Chinese developmental dyslexia. Reading and Writing 13, 57–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ho, C. S.-H. & Ma, R. N.-L. (1999). Training in phonological strategies improves Chinese dyslexic children's character reading skills. Journal of Research in Reading 22, 131–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hu, C.-F. & Catts, H. W. (1998). The role of phonological processing in early reading ability: what we can learn from Chinese. Scientific Studies of Reading 2, 55–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huang, H. S. & Hanley, J. R. (1994). Phonological awareness and visual skills in learning to read Chinese and English. Cognition 54, 73–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huang, H. S. & Hanley, J. R. (1997). A longitudinal study of phonological awareness, visual skills, and Chinese reading acquisition among first-graders in Taiwan. International Journal of Behavioral Development 20, 249–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liberman, I. Y., Mann, V. A., Shankweiler, D. & Werfelman, M. (1982). Children's memory for recurring linguistic and nonlinguistic material relation to reading ability. Cortex 18, 367–75.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Luo, Q. & Weekes, B. S. (2004). Tonal dyslexia in Chinese. Brain and Language 91, 102–103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McBride-Chang, C. & Ho, C. S.-H. (2000). Developmental issues in Chinese children's character acquisition. Journal of Educational Psychology 92, 50–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McDougall, S., Hulme, C., Ellis, A. & Monk, A. (1994). Learning to read: the role of short-term memory and phonological skills. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 58, 112–33.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Messbauer, V. C. S. & de Jong, P. F. (2003). Word, nonword, and visual paired associate learning in Dutch dyslexic children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 84, 77–96.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Olson, R. K., Rack, J. P. & Forsberg, H. (1990). Profiles of abilities in dyslexics and reading-level-matched controls. Poster presented at the Rodin Remediation Academy meeting at Boulder, Colorado, September 1990.Google Scholar
Schirmer, A., Tang, S.-L., Penney, T. B., Gunter, T. C. & Chen, H.-C. (2005). Brain responses to segmentally and tonally induced semantic violations in Cantonese. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 17, 1–12.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Siok, W. T. & Fletcher, P. (2001). The role of phonological awareness and visual-orthographic skills in Chinese reading acquisition. Developmental Psychology 37, 886–99.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
So, D. & Siegel, L. S. (1997). Learning to read Chinese: semantic, syntactic, phonological and working memory skills in normally achieving and poor Chinese readers. Reading and Writing 9, 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Swan, D. & Goswami, U. (1997). Phonological awareness deficits in developmental dyslexia and the phonological representation hypothesis. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 66, 18–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taft, M. & Chen, H.-C. (1992). Judging homophony in Chinese: the influence of tones. In Chen, H.-C. & Tzeng, O. J. L. (eds), Language processing in Chinese, 151–72. Amsterdam: Elsevier.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tsang, K.-K. & Hoosain, R. (1979). Segmental phonemes and total phonemes in comprehension of Cantonese. Psychologia 22, 222–24.Google Scholar
Windfuhr, K. L. & Snowling, M. J. (2001). The relationship between paired associate learning and phonological skills in normally developing readers. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 80, 160–73.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ye, Y. & Connine, C. M. (1999). Processing spoken Chinese: the role of tone information. Language and Cognitive Processes 14, 609–630.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yue, H. O.-K. (1972). Studies in Yue dialects 1: Phonology of Cantonese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Zhou, Y. K. (1980). Precise guide to pronunciation with Chinese phonological roots. Jilin, China: People's Publishing [in Chinese].Google Scholar
Zhou, X.-L., Qu, Y.-X., Shu, H., Gaskell, G. & Marslen-Wilson, W. (2004). Constraints of lexical tone on semantic activation in Chinese spoken word recognition. Acta Psychologica Sinica 36, 379–92.Google Scholar