Chinese-English bi-scriptural reading: cognitive

component skills across orthographies

Xiuli Tong & Catherine McBride-Chang (2010)Reading & Writing (23) 293-310

Presented by Gabrielle Jones 9/22/10PSY525 Professor Sue Guarnsey

Learning to read…

Reading route characterized by the written system (Bialystock, Majumder, & Martin, 2003)

Word reading vary across languages (Wade- Wooley & Kirby, 2007; Koda, 2000)

Specific educational practices (Leong et al., 2005; Shu et al., 2003)

Word reading across alphabetic and non alphabetic languages. Phonological awareness Morphological awareness Orthographic knowledge

Semantic Radicals 媽

Characters

English Pinyin

妈 妈 mother ma

她 she ta

姐 姐 older sister jiejie

妹 妹 younger sister

meimei

女朋友 girlfriend nupengyou

妈 ma

妈 = female =

Pinyin: Tonal representation

Interrogation participle

http://www.fonetiks.org/sou2ch.html

hemp

mother

horse

to scold

More about Radicals

Semantic Radicals tend to be in positions either left or top (Larger repertoire of semantic radicals -7,000 morphemes in Mandarin)

Phonetic Radicals tend to be in the right or bottom positions (1,300 different spoken syllables in Mandarin for example) Phonetic radicals are not consistent (Shu et

al., 2002) 紅 : hong2 - red 江 : ji4ang1 – while they both have the same right radical,

they do not sound the same and neither are related to the semantic radical 工 “ gong” which means work

What common components are involved in bi-scriptal reading?

Phonological awareness and orthographic experience in Chinese influences process of learning to read English (Cheung, Chan & Chong, 2007; Gottardo, Chiappe, Yan, Siegel & Gu, 2006; Leong et al., 2005; Wang & Geva, 2003; Wang et al., 2005)

Chinese Phonological processing associated with Chinese pseudo-word reading and English word reading (Gottardo et al., 2001)

Chinese children learning English as L2 outperformed native English speaking children on pseudo-word spelling (Wang & Geva, 2003)

Participants

Native Hong Kong Cantonese speaking children

5 upper middle class primary schools 163 2nd graders (mean age = 96.6 mos) 163 5th graders (mean age = 132.65)

Bilingual English and Chinese curriculum

Children are taught to read in Chinese at age of 3-4 and English at the age of 4-5 years old through the “look and say” method not phonics.

Lexical Word Measures

Chinese Word Recognition

61 item Character recognition test 27 single character words & 34 two character words

150 item test Hong Kong Test of Specific Learning Difficulties in Reading and Writing (HKT-SpLD) All two character words

All tests were arranged in increasing difficulty. Words were represented alone top to bottom/left to right

English Word Reading

60 English high frequency words (K and primary school)

All tests were arranged in increasing difficulty

Cognitive Measures

Raven’s Progressive Matrices Geometric design with a portion missing

Phonological Awareness (PA) syllable deletion 29 three syllable words

(real and nonsense words) delete first, final or middle syllable = “Lemon

tea” without “tea” would be “lemon” syllable onset deletion- 22 items

Delete the initial sound from the syllable “po4” children would say “o4”

Cognitive Measures Morphological Awareness (MA)

Morphological construction 27 3-sentence scenarios Described an object/concept and create a new concept

using the lexical compounding “ drawerball” Homophone production 14 items

• 1st part: Target morpheme/monosyllable shown- asked to form new words using target morpheme within 10sec

• 2nd part: generate words that

included homophones of target monosyllable within 10 sec.

Meaning and Written form are different

Visual Configuration Discrimination (VOS) Discriminate real non lexical radicals and

stroke patterns from a set of misspelling and incorrect non lexical radicals

Cognitive Measures

Chinese Word Reading

Within Language Associations

MA was uniquely associated with Chinese character recognition in both grades

VOS strongly associated with Chinese word reading across grades

Results

English Word Reading

Cross Language Associations

PA measured in Chinese strongly associated with English word reading in both grades

Strong crossover effect of Chinese VOS on English word reading

No cross-linguistic transfer from Chinese MA to English word reading

Results

Both within and cross language

Associations Phonological Awareness (PA),

Morphological Awareness (MA) and visual-orthographic skills (VOS) improved with age.

Results

Discussion

Chinese children whose L1 is Chinese and learning to read English as L2 adopt a visual orthographic-based strategy

Discrimination of different graphic patterns stem from Chinese character recognition skills (Huang & Hanley, 1995; Siok & Fletcher) Spatial versus Linear

Instructional practices influencing reading strategies- Look and say method

Does the different types of morphological awareness inhibit the transfer?

Perfetti,C., Anderson, R.C &

Leung, C.K

Toronto, July 2010Reading Chinese Research