Development of Chinese kindergarten children’s print awareness and its influence on reading and formal numeracy

Abstract

Children gain knowledge about the surrounding print system before formally taught to read (Whitehurst & Lognigan, 1998). This knowledge, a.k.a. print awareness, is potentially associated with both early literacy and numeracy acquisition, as writing and number systems are both notational systems signifying meaning (Bialystok, 1992). Examining contribution of print awareness to reading and numeracy adds to our knowledge about early common precursors to literacy and numeracy, which most of previous studies revealed to be oral language skills (Dehaene, 1992; Hecht, Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 2001; Simmons & Singleton, 2008; Zhang & Lin, 2015). Current studies on the association between print awareness and numeracy were mostly conducted in the context of alphabetical languages (Koponen, Aunola, Ahonen, & Nurmi, 2007; Korpipää et al., 2017; Purpura, Hume, Sims, & Lonigan, 2011), leaving open the question whether the similar patterns apply to Chinese children. Print awareness in Chinese entails two components. The first is to understand the outer form of Chinese characters, the foundational unit in the Chinese writing system, e.g. the awareness that characters have visual-formal features different from drawings (Treiman & Yin, 2011). The second is to analyze its inner structure. A majority of characters are composed of radicals, and the combination of the radicals features certain constraints. The ability to detect violation of such constrains reflects children’s awareness of the inner-structure of Chinese character (Li et al., 2006; Qian et al., 2015). Print awareness contributed greatly and independently to Chinese word reading (Luo, Chen, Deacon, Zhang, & Yin, 2013; Tong, McBride-Chang, Shu & Wong, 2009; Wang & McBride-Chang, 2016). However, the role it plays in early numeracy is understudied. This study examined the developmental trajectories of print awareness featuring the two components, and the role it played in the development of reading and formal numeracy. We hypothesized that sensitivity to the outer form and the inner structure both predicted changes in reading and formal numeracy. Participants were 209 children (117 boys; age: M ± SD = 46.34±3.32 in months) recruited from six preschools in Hong Kong. They were assessed five times at a 6-month interval during 2.5 years. Print awareness was measured four times by the Chinese decision task (Li et al., 2006; Tong et al., 2009). Chinese word reading and symbolic numeracy (number identification, number writing, written number comparison) as outcomes were tested twice at the beginning and the end of the study. Cognitive covariates were tested at the beginning of the study. Latent growth curve modelling was employed for data analysis. The growth of the inner-structural awareness significantly contributed to subsequent reading and form numeracy beyond the influence of autoregressive effect, vocabulary, rapid naming, mental rotation and memory, and the outer-formal awareness had an indirect effect on reading and numeracy via inner-structural awareness. The findings highlighted the potential role of Chinese print awareness as precursor to both reading and numeracy among Chinese children. Particularly, the inner-structural awareness subsumed outer-formal awareness and played a more important role.