A study of the relations between the phonological and orthographic processing and Chinese character reading of bilingual children of Hong Kong

Abstract

In order to study the roles of phonological and orthographic processing in beginner reading, the syllable deletion task, the short the verbal memory task, the speeded naming task and the Chinese characters, letters and numbers orientation task were used. 116 bilingual children of Hong Kong aged about 6 took part in the test. The results showed that: 1 ) phonological processing skills, which were cross-linguistic and relatively stable, were good early predictors in Chinese character recognition and English word recognition; 2) orthographic processing was specific as character-orientating processing only predicted Chinese character recognition, while letter-orientation processing predicted English word recognition.

采用音節檢測、短時言語記憶、快速命名等語音加工任務和漢字、字母、數字等方向加工任務,探討語音和文字加工在兒童初步閱讀中的作用,116名6歲左右的香港雙語兒童參加了測試。結果表明:語音加工能力是跨語言的比較穩定的因素,是預測漢語和英語閱讀的較好指標;文字加工具有特異性,即漢字方向加工只能預測漢語閱讀,字母方向加工則預測英語閱讀。