Suprasegmental but not segmental phonological awareness matters in understanding bilingual reading comprehension difficulties in Chinese and English: a 3-year longitudinal study

How phonological and orthographic decoding complicates the simple view of reading in Chinese: examining mediation through listening comprehension

Advocates of the science of reading have invoked the simple view of reading (SVR) to justify an approach that foregrounds decoding in early reading instruction. SVR describes reading comprehension as the product of decoding and listening comprehension. The current study examined the complexity of the SVR, focusing on the phonological and orthographic decoding in third-grade readers of Chinese. One hundred and forty-three students participated in this study. The measures included phonological decoding (pinyin invented spelling), orthographic decoding, listening comprehension and reading comprehension. Drawing upon regression analyses and multivariate path models, the study found that phonological decoding at both segmental and suprasegmental processing significantly predicted Chinese reading comprehension, yet a more significant effect of orthographic decoding surfaced. And the best-fitting model suggested listening comprehension was better characterized as a mediator rather than a covariance with decoding component in the decoding-reading relation when orthographic decoding was incorporated into decoding component to evaluate the validity of the SVR in Chinese. The results imply that orthographic decoding is a legitimate decoding component and that the two decoding constructs alone are insufficient for higher-level reading ability (reading comprehension) since the contribution appears to be mediated through the path route of oral language capacity (indexed by listening comprehension). This enriches the current understanding of the SVR in non-alphabetic languages and indicates that decoding training on both phonological and orthographic dimension should be highlighted in early Chinese reading instruction.

Speech Prosody and Reading Comprehension in Chinese-English Bilingual Children: The Mediating Role of Syntactic Awareness

PURPOSE

Although children's prosodic sensitivity links with their reading comprehension, the factors affecting this link remain unclear. By simultaneously measuring first language (L1) Chinese and second language (L2) English prosodic sensitivity and reading comprehension, this study examined the mediating role of syntactic awareness on prosody-reading comprehension among Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children.

METHOD

A group of 227 Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual fourth graders completed L1 and L2 prosodic sensitivity (Cantonese lexical tone awareness and English prosodic sensitivity), syntactic awareness, and reading comprehension and control measures of cognitive (nonverbal IQ, short-term memory, and working memory), metalinguistic (phonological awareness and morphological awareness), linguistic (vocabulary knowledge), and word reading skills.

RESULTS

The within-language analyses showed a partial mediation effect of Chinese syntactic awareness on the relation between Cantonese lexical tone awareness and Chinese reading comprehension, but a full mediation effect of English syntactic awareness on the relation between English prosodic sensitivity and English reading comprehension. The cross-language analyses revealed a significant direct effect of Cantonese lexical tone awareness on English reading comprehension and a significant indirect effect of English prosodic sensitivity on Chinese reading comprehension via Chinese syntactic awareness.

CONCLUSION

These findings suggest that, despite the language-independent mediating role of syntactic awareness in bridging prosody and reading comprehension, the degree of this mediation is shaped by language-specific prosody and its relations with other linguistic structures, including semantics.

Distinct neural correlates of poor decoding and poor comprehension in children with reading disability

Reading disability (RD) can manifest itself as a word decoding problem or a reading comprehension problem. In the current study, we identified 3 subtypes of RD: poor decoders (PD), poor comprehenders (PC), and poor-in-both (PB). We found that PD had greater deficits in meta-linguistic skills such as phonological awareness, orthographic skills, and morphological skills than PC, whereas PC had greater deficits in listening comprehension than PD. In the brain, we also found different patterns of deficits during an auditory rhyming judgment task using functional magnetic resonance imaging. PD showed less activation than PC and age controls in the left dorsal inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and pre-supplementary motor area (SMA), brain activation of which was correlated with phonological awareness and working memory. In contrast, PC showed less activation in the left fusiform gyrus than PD and age controls, which was correlated with reading comprehension fluency and morphological skill. Last, PB showed both PD's and PC's deficits, as well as additional deficits in the bilateral lingual gyri. Our findings contribute to revealing different neural signatures of poor decoding and poor comprehension, which are distinct disorders but co-occur very often. These findings implicate possibility and necessity of precise diagnosis and individualized intervention.