Purpose: The present study tested parafoveal morphological processing during sentence reading with two eye-tracking experiments, making use of an implicit measurement of morphological awareness. In Chinese and Korean, each character form typically corresponds to multiple mental lexicons, leading to morphological ambiguity. Method: Using the…

Word reading and word spelling are important processes of literacy acquisition for children. The longitudinal relationship between reading and spelling is still unclear, especially among bilinguals and biscriptals. In the present study, we compared the longitudinal word reading-spelling relationship in L1 (Chinese) and L2 (English), together with…

Background: Rapid automatised naming (RAN) has been found to predict children's reading and arithmetic abilities. However, the underlying mechanisms for its involvement in the two abilities are not clear. This study examines how RAN shared variances with domain-general and domain-specific abilities in predicting reading and arithmetic in Chinese…

The acoustic properties of infant-directed speech (IDS) have been widely studied, but whether and how young learners' language development benefits from individual properties remains to be confirmed. This study investigated whether toddlers' word processing was affected by tone hyperarticulation in the IDS of a tone language. Nineteen- and…

This study investigated the impact of home literacy environment (HLE) on the acquisition of English as a second language (L2) and reading skills in Chinese-speaking kindergarten children. The sample was 354 kindergarten children (mean age: 60.37 months, SD = 7.25; 186 boys, 52.5%) in Hong Kong, China. Mothers completed a questionnaire measuring…

We examined the developmental trajectories and cognitive predictors of first language Chinese reading, second language English reading, and mathematics skills in Hong Kong children in Grades 1-5. We used longitudinal data of 1,000 children (M[subscript age] = 7.59 years) assessed on phonological awareness, rapid naming, and morphological awareness…

Despite much attention having been paid to foreign language (FL) reading and related variables such as self-efficacy, relatively few studies have focused on young learners, and even fewer on storybooks, arguably the commonest genre read by children worldwide for language learning. As FL learning commences at a young age in many contexts globally,…

The present study explored the mediating effect of word detection on the relationship between visual-spatial attention and reading comprehension in Chinese. The participants included 287 Hong Kong Chinese children (167 third graders, 84 girls, "mean age" = 8.73, SD = 0.49, and 120 fourth graders, 45 girls, "mean age" = 9.93, SD…

Research Findings: This cross-sectional study examined the class- and child-level associations of social-emotional competence with behavioral and academic adjustment among Chinese kindergarten children and tested teacher collectivistic socialization goals as a moderator. Participants were 523 kindergarten children and their mothers and class…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to assess Cantonese word recognition and the discrimination of Cantonese tones with manipulated contours by child and adolescent cochlear implant (CI) users and a group of peers with normal hearing (NH). It was hypothesized that the CI users would perform more poorly than their counterparts with NH in both…

The ability to map similar sounding words to different meanings alone is far from enough for successful speech processing. To overcome variability in the speech signal, young learners must also recognize words across surface variations. Previous studies have shown that infants at 14 months are able to use variations in word-internal cues (i.e.,…

This study examined the relationship between the frequency of mother-child and father-child literacy teaching activities and the reading skills of Chinese preschool children. A total of 105 Hong Kong Chinese preschoolers and their fathers and mothers were involved. Fathers and mothers independently reported the frequency of their own literacy…

Successful listening in a second language (L2) involves learning to identify the relevant acoustic-phonetic dimensions that differentiate between words in the L2, and then use these cues to access lexical representations during real-time comprehension. This is a particularly challenging goal to achieve when the relevant acoustic-phonetic…

Drawing on Geary's (1995) evolution-based model of cognitive and academic development, this study investigated the relation between biologically primary skills (vocabulary, executive functions, and visual-spatial processing) and subsequent word reading and calculation. It also examined the extent to which these relations were mediated by…

Auditory processing and spoken word recognition difficulties have been observed in Specific Language Impairment (SLI), raising the possibility that auditory perceptual deficits disrupt word recognition and, in turn, phonological processing and oral language. In this study, fifty-seven kindergarten children with SLI and fifty-three language-typical…