Linguistic awareness skills in Chinese-speaking children with hyperlexia

Abstract

Previous studies revealed that hyperlexic children of alphabetic scripts possess advanced reading ability and comparable orthographic awareness skill compared with their chronological-age matched peers. Yet, conflicting findings on phonological awareness skill were reported. As a morphosyllabic language, typical Chinese reading does not rely on grapheme-phoneme correspondence and the phonetic information conveyed in syllables does not necessarily reflect an accurate pronunciation in phonologically semiregular and regular words. It is thereby suggested that Chinese hyperlexic reading may rely more on morphological and orthographic awareness skill but less on phonological awareness skill. A Chinese-speaking child with hyperlexia, typically-developing chronological-age matched group and mental-age matched group were assessed on their phonological, morphological and orthographic skills. The results showed that the hyperlexic child achieved significantly better orthographic skill in discriminating real and pseudo- characters than both control groups. Yet, comparable performance was obtained in phonological and morphological awareness tests. Thus, among three linguistic awareness skills, orthographic awareness skill is the most important contributing factor to Chinese hyperlexic reading. Given that a large proportion of Chinese characters is phonologically regular, advanced orthographic skill facilitates identification of phonetic radicals that gives clue to the sound of syllables and significantly helps hyperlexic reading in Chinese.