This study examined the roles of sub-character processing, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and orthographic knowledge, measured using twelve different tasks hypothesized to indicate these four broad constructs, in Chinese character recognition and English word reading among 536 Hong Kong Chinese kindergartners, second- and fifth-graders. The twelve tasks generally showed an increase in performance with grade level. Confirmatory factor analyses comparing alternative models of these four constituents of Chinese word reading revealed a dynamic pattern of children's latent linguistic or reading processing skills development: The best-fitting model of kindergartners' processing was one that included two broad constructs, broadly termed metalinguistic processing and orthographic processing. In contrast, second-graders showed a fine-grained sensitivity to four distinct skills of sub-character processing, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and orthographic knowledge. Finally, the latent processing skills of the fifth-graders converged into phonological and orthographic processing. The contributions of each of these initially specified constructs, i.e., sub-character processing, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and orthographic knowledge, to Chinese word reading varied across each separate grade in regression analyses. The sub-character processing construct was uniquely associated with kindergarten Chinese word reading only. In contrast, the morphological awareness construct was uniquely associated with Chinese word reading in both second- and fifth-graders. The orthographic knowledge construct was uniquely associated with word reading across ail three grades. However, the phonological awareness construct was not uniquely associated with Chinese word reading in any of the groups of children, though it was uniquely associated with English word reading, even with Chinese character recognition skill statistically controlled. These findings demonstrate how Chinese word reading might develop across age and highlight the importance of sub-character processing, morphological awareness and orthographic knowledge for Chinese word reading development as well as the importance of phonological awareness for English word reading. / Tong Xiuli. / Adviser: Catherine McBride-Chang. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: B, page: 3806. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 151-166). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese; includes Chinese characters. / School code: 1307.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:cuhk.edu.hk/oai:cuhk-dr:cuhk_344245 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Contributors | Tong, Xiuli., Chinese University of Hong Kong Graduate School. Division of Psychology. |
| Source Sets | The Chinese University of Hong Kong |
| Language | English, Chinese, Chinese |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, theses |
| Format | electronic resource, microform, microfiche, 1 online resource (xii, 166 leaves : ill.) |
| Rights | Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International” License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) |
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