The goal of this study was to examine the cross-lagged relations between vocabulary and word reading in children learning two scripts at the same time (pinyin and Chinese). One hundred fifty-nine third-year kindergarten Chinese children (70 girls and 89 boys; mean age = 72.70 months) were assessed on measures of nonverbal IQ, phonological…

Holistic processing has been identified as an expertise marker of face and object recognition. By contrast, reduced holistic processing is purportedly an expertise marker in recognising orthographic characters in Chinese. Does holistic processing increase or decrease in expertise development? Is orthographic recognition a domain-specific exception…

Dialogic reading (DR) is an interactive reading approach that enhances the language development of children. This study aims to extend DR to the shared reading context involving children with attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and their older siblings and to examine the effects of DR with parents/siblings on the language development…

The present study aimed to examine the potential importance of orthographic flexibility for Chinese reading acquisition. Orthographic flexibility is a novel concept that represents the ability to manage and switch attention among multiple aspects of orthographic information. A total of 92 Chinese kindergarten children at age 6 were assessed on…

Background: Recent research suggests that diverse types of copying, including pure copying, copying fluency and delayed copying, contributed to children's spelling of Chinese characters and English words but not to word recognition. This study examined the relations of pure copying, copying fluency and delayed copying to beginning word reading and…

This study investigated the direct and indirect roles of verbal and visuospatial memory in Chinese reading comprehension. One hundred twenty-eight Cantonese-speaking children participated in the study at the end of their 3rd year of kindergarten in Hong Kong. Both verbal and visuospatial memory were found to be significantly associated with…

The number of Chinese children living in poverty has risen steadily in Hong Kong, China. However, little is known on the longitudinal effects of family socioeconomic status (SES) on cognitive-linguistic skills, word reading and writing in children from low-SES backgrounds. This study examines differences in cognitive-linguistic skills and word…

Background: Research has shown that paired associate learning (PAL) plays an important role in children's word reading across different languages. However, little is known about the construct of PAL and its relationship with word reading in Chinese children. Methods: A total of 204 second-year kindergarten children from Mainland China were…

The Singapore government has launched kindergarten curriculum reform since 2003 to promote constructivism in teaching and learning, which seems to contradict the traditional pedagogy. Using video analysis, we examined the actual classroom dialogue in six Chinese language classrooms to understand to what extent the constructivist pedagogy has been…

This study developed and validated a Chinese name writing scale (CNWS) for evaluating early handwriting skills of kindergarten children. We then used the validated CNWS to examine the developmental characteristics of Chinese name writing skills among kindergarten children in Hong Kong in a cross-sectional study. CNWS was developed based on English…

The present study examined phonological processing skills (phonological memory, phonological awareness, and rapid automatised naming, RAN) in relation to early Chinese reading and early Chinese mathematics for young children. Early Chinese reading was assessed with single character reading and multi-character word reading, and early mathematics…

This study assessed the effects of three intervention programs for Chinese literacy development in kindergartners: the copying (Copy) program; a combined program of copying and Pinyin knowledge (Copy + Pinyin); and a combined program of copying and morphological awareness (Copy + MA). Ninety-seven kindergarteners aged 5-7 years in mainland China…

Research Findings: In this study, 88 kindergartners received special training in lexical compounding, homophone awareness, or phonological awareness or were assigned to a control condition over a period of approximately 2 months, with 20-min lessons administered twice per week. Chinese word reading improved significantly more in the lexical…

Three common assumptions concerning bilingual children's language proficiency are: (1) their proficiency in two languages is usually unbalanced; (2) low socioeconomic status (SES) indicates low proficiency in both languages; and (3) encouraging parents to speak some societal language at home will promote its development. Examining the vocabulary…

We designed two experiments to investigate subsyllabic unit preference in reading Pinyin in Chinese kindergarteners. Pinyin is an alphabetic transcription used in Mainland China to assist children in learning to read Chinese characters. In Pinyin instruction, teachers rely heavily on onset-rime division. Spoken Chinese, however, encourages…