Are visual skills unimportant to Chinese readers in primary-school level?

Abstract

PURPOSE: Despite the visual complexity of Chinese words increases across grades, it is surprising that visual skills accounted for significant variance in Chinese word reading for kindergarten readers (Ho & Byrant, 1999; Ho & Byrant, 1997, Mcbride-Chang and Ho, 2000) but not for primary school readers (Chen and Wong, 1991; Hu and Catts, 1998; Huang and Hanley, 1997). This study aimed at re-exploring visual word recognition of primary school readers by adding in an intermediate variable, the knowledge of radicals, which is the basic orthographic unit of Chinese language. METHODS AND RESULTS: Study 1 explored the relationships among visual skill, orthographic skill and word recognition for 384 readers from Primary One to Four. After partialling out the effects of age and IQ, orthographic skills accounted uniquely for 5% of the variance in word recognition. Visual skills did not predict word recognition, but accounted for 4% of the variance in orthographic skills. These findings showed that radical knowledge is important in word recognition. Visual skills are employed in decoding radicals, rather than decoding words as a whole. This difference further implies an implicit perceptual decomposition of words into radicals during visual processing. Study 2 compared 30 dyslexic, 30 chronological-age matched and 30 reading-level matched readers on a variety of visual and orthographic tasks. The dyslexic group performed significantly worse than the CA group on all the tasks. Combined with the results from Study 1, it is speculated that the word decoding difficulties of dyslexic readers might stem from poor understanding of radicals, which in turn is visually dependent. To further explore why the dyslexic group perform poorly on visual tasks, Study 3 employed the eye-tracking technique on a visual discrimination task for 10 dyslexic readers, 10 CA control and 5 RL control. Compared with the CA group, the dyslexic group had significantly more fixations and longer fixation duration on the target form, and exhibited more sequential comparisons between their chosen form and the distracters. It is speculated that the dyslexic readers need more cognitive resources on identifying features of a visual form, and are more prone to the interference of visually-similar distracters. CONCLUSION: Radicals play an important role in the visual recognition of Chinese words. Readers start with learning single characters made up of one or few radicals, and progress into compound characters of multiple radicals. This may account for the importance of visual skills in word reading for kindergarten readers, but not for primary school readers. Reading difficulties in Chinese readers may stem from inefficient visual processing of radicals and interference of visually-similar radicals. These further hinder the development of orthographic skills, such as recognizing the positional and functional regularity of radicals, and subsequently leads to poorer word decoding performance.