This study investigated the rate of school-aged Chinese-English language learners at risk for reading difficulties in either Chinese or English only, or both, among second and fifth graders in Hong Kong. In addition, we examined the metalinguistic skills that distinguished those who were poor in reading Chinese from those who were poor in reading…

An in-depth exploration of the associations of two aspects of morphological awareness in Chinese--homophone awareness and lexical compounding awareness--to Chinese word reading and vocabulary knowledge was the primary focus of the present study. Among 154 9-year-old Hong Kong Chinese children, both lexical compounding and homophone awareness were…

Preschoolers' metalinguistic and visual capabilities may be associated with the writing system of their culture. We examined patterns of performance in phonological awareness, naming of letters, morphological awareness, and visual-spatial relations, in 5-year-old native speakers of Spanish (n = 43), Hebrew (n = 40), and Cantonese (n = 63) and the…

Eighty-five Hong Kong Chinese children were tested across both the 2nd and 3rd years of kindergarten (ages 4-5 years) on tasks of inhibitory control, working memory, vocabulary knowledge, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and word reading. With age, vocabulary knowledge, and metalinguistic skills statistically controlled, the…

The present study examined the relations of Chinese word reading and writing to both maternal mediation of writing and a number of metalinguistic and cognitive skills in 63 Hong Kong Chinese kindergarteners. The whole process of maternal mediation of writing, in which mothers individually facilitated their children's writing of 12 two-character…

A total of 82 Chinese 11- and 12-year-olds with and without dyslexia were tested on four paired associate learning (PAL) tasks, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, rapid naming, and verbal short-term memory in three different experiments. Experiment 1 demonstrated that children with dyslexia were significantly poorer in visual-verbal…

In this study, we examined the intercorrelations among speech perception, metalinguistic (i.e., phonological and morphological) awareness, word reading, and vocabulary in a 1st language (L1) and a 2nd language (L2). Results from 3 age groups of Chinese-English bilingual children showed that speech perception was more predictive of reading and…

This 1-year longitudinal study examined the extent to which morphological awareness, orthographic knowledge, and phonological awareness, along with speeded naming, uniquely explained word recognition, dictation (i.e., spelling), and reading comprehension among 171 young Hong Kong Chinese children. With age and vocabulary knowledge statistically…

This study investigates the effects of parent-child shared book reading and metalinguistic training on the language and literacy skills of 148 kindergartners in Hong Kong. Children were pretested on Chinese character recognition, vocabulary, morphological awareness, and reading interest and then assigned randomly to 1 of 4 conditions: the dialogic…