Literacy skills are important for children's development. The present study explored the effectiveness of a parent coaching approach on the reading and spelling skills and compared cognitive-linguistic skills performances between Chinese children with and without dyslexia. Participants were 33 children with dyslexia and 77 children without…

Grammatical and vocabulary knowledge (i.e., breadth and depth) are widely acknowledged as key predictors of reading comprehension in a second language (L2). However, it remains unclear how different aspects of vocabulary depth may independently contribute to L2 reading comprehension and how learners' proficiency may moderate the relative…

This study investigated the cross-sectional relationships between reading-related affective and cognitive factors and reading skills among adolescents with and without dyslexia. Participants were 120 Chinese-speaking eighth graders, including 60 adolescents with dyslexia and 60 typically developing adolescents from Hong Kong, China. Adolescents…

Dyslexia and developmental language disorders are important learning difficulties. However, their genetic basis remains poorly understood, and most genetic studies were performed on Europeans. There is a lack of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) on literacy phenotypes of Chinese as a native language and English as a second language (ESL) in a…

The script relativity hypothesis proposes that the scripts we read and write affect our cognition. The current study tested this hypothesis by comparing Chinese and English cognitive-linguistic skills and three cognitive abilities, including verbal working memory capacity, nonverbal IQ, and arithmetic calculation, across groups of children with…

In this study, we investigated the direct and indirect associations of different cognitive-linguistic skills and Chinese reading comprehension in Hong Kong kindergarteners. We assessed 179 children's nonverbal IQ, cognitive-linguistic skills, word reading, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension. Results showed significant correlations…

While the close relationship between the brain system for speech processing and reading development is well-documented in alphabetic languages, whether and how such a link exists in children in a language without systematic grapheme-phoneme correspondence has not been directly investigated. In the present study, we measured Chinese children's…

Background: Evidence shows that children's household contexts of economic pressure and home chaos may better represent children's daily home experiences than family socioeconomic status. Still, limited research has examined the impacts of household contexts on child developmental outcomes and their underlying mechanisms. Objective: This study…

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 role of parental literacy skills in cross-linguistic transfer, the phenomenon of the sharing of skills and competence from one language to another, is under-researched. The present study tested 147 Hong Kong Chinese children and their parents (76 boys; mean age = 7.16). Parental literacy skills significantly explained children's reading and…

An early home literacy environment is essential to children's later reading development. However, few studies have explored the home literacy environment's influence on Chinese reading in preschoolers across a wide age range. The present study mainly investigated the effects of the home literacy environment on Chinese word reading in 3- to…

This study aims to examine the relative contributions of phonological awareness (PA), orthographical awareness (OA), morphological awareness (MA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) to word reading accuracy and fluency in Chinese deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students. Measures of PA, OA, MA, RAN, word reading accuracy, and word reading fluency…

Cross-language transfer happens in bilingual reading development. However, little is known about whether L1 affects L2 spelling development. In addition, longitudinal studies are needed to examine the L1-L2 relations developmentally from the beginning of literacy learning. We tested whether and which Chinese (L1) literacy-related skill(s) in…

This study examined the bidirectionality between kindergarten children's executive functioning (EF) and word reading across two time points. Participants were 523 Hong Kong Chinese-speaking children (mean age at Time 2 = 64.59 months; 52.9% male) and their parents. At Time 1, children were administered the measures of EF skills: inhibitory…

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…