2007/07/18

McBride-Chang, C. & Ho, C. S-H. (2000). Developmental Issues in Chinese Children’s Character Acquisition. Journal of Educational Psychology, 92 (1), 50-55.

Presentation: Renee
Summary: Sally

Following McBride-Chang’s previous study (1995) on children using alphabetical writing systems, this study investigated issues including the nature of phonological awareness in a Chinese context, the extent to which phonological processing skills are uniquely associated with character recognition, as well as whether letter naming is independently correlated with character recognition. In total, 109 Hong Kong Chinese children in the first year of kindergarten were recruited for the study. Results showed that similar to what has been found in previous studies, speech perception did contribute to a phonological awareness measure after age, vocabulary, and verbal memory were controlled. Secondly, compared with verbal memory and naming speed, phonological awareness was found as a more important phonological processing skill in predicting Chinese character recognition. Lastly, letter naming uniquely predicted Chinese character recognition. The high correlation was believed to come from the task design, pairing oral names with writing forms, which belong to visually paired associates rather than pure visual measures.