Cognitive abilities underlying reading in chinese -Typical readers among third-grade children in Taiwan

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to clarify the cognitive abilities underlying reading in Chinese. In this study, tests of phonological awareness, visual cognition, automatization and vocabulary were administered to 103 third-grade elementary school children in Taiwan. Mandarin-speaking children in Taiwan learn "Zhu-Yin Fu-Hao" before learning Chinese characters. "Zhu-Yin Fu-Hao" is a combined phonological script involving phonemes and syllables. The phonological awareness tests we conducted therefore included phoneme awareness and syllable awareness. According to multiple regression analysis, visual cognition showed a significant unique contribution to Chinese character reading. It is likely that character-to-sound conversion and semantics are more strongly reflected in the configuration of Chinese characters. The visual cognition skills, including the abilities to recognize and discriminate unfamiliar figures, are closely related to learning Chinese characters. However, the influence of phonological awareness was not significant. The authors presume that when children read Chinese, the functional units of phonological representation in Chinese are onsets and rimes, instead of phonemes or syllables.