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Current Medical Science 38(2):336-341,2018 Current Medical Science 38(2):2018 DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s11596-018-1884-3
Development of Orthographic Awareness, Morphological Awareness and Rapid Automatized Naming of Elementary-level Students in China: A Longitudinal Analysis from Grades 1 to 4* Xiu LUO†, Rui KONG†, Ling-fei LIU, Jia WANG, Huai-ting GU, Fang HOU, Ran-ran SONG# Department of Maternal and Child Health and MOE (Ministry of Education) Key Laboratory of Environment and Health, School of Public Health, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430030, China Huazhong University of Science and Technology 2018
Summary: The longitudinal study sought to examine the dynamic development of cognitive skills for reading among elementary-level students in Mainland China. Two groups of students in first (n=164, mean age=6.65 years at first test) and second grade (n=202, mean age=7.73 years at first test) were followed on orthographic awareness, morphological awareness and rapid automatized naming (RAN) for two years. The children exhibited significant improvement in orthographic awareness, morphological awareness and RAN from grades 1 to 4. More importantly, to the orthographic and morphological awareness, while the children took a leap from grade 1 to 2 and grade 3 to 4, the progress developed at relatively slow rates from grade 2 to 3. In order to assure children’s development of orthographic and morphological awareness, evidence-based orthographically and morphologically enhanced instruction is needed for Chinese children in the early elementary years, especially for those at the stage from grade 2 to 3. Key words: orthographic awareness; morphological awareness; rapid automatized naming; elementary-level students; China
Learning to read is a key ability for all children to access appropriate educational resources and succeed in school. Children who experience significant difficulties in reading may continue to display problems into adulthood, even can have some serious consequences[1, 2]. Proficiency in reading requires that children successfully utilize and coordinate many cognitive processes and kinds of knowledge. Several cognitive skills, including orthographic awareness, morphological awareness and rapid automatized naming (RAN) have been found to be significantly related to reading acquisition across different Xiu LUO, E-mail:
[email protected], Rui KONG, E-mail:
[email protected] † Both authors contributed equally to this work. # Corresponding author, E-mail:
[email protected] * This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 81673194,81273092).
orthographies[3-5]. The writing system has specific conventions that concern the visual and orthographic aspects of print[6]. Recently, there has been increasing interest in orthographic learning account of reading disabilities, which highlights the ability to establish graphemephoneme mappings[7]. In contrast with alphabetic scripts, in which letters represent phonemes, the basic graphic units in Chinese are characters. There are complex functional and positional regularities of radicals in Chinese characters that are the crux of characters’ orthographic structure. Besides, due to the lack of reliable grapheme-phoneme correspondence of the Chinese characters, not fully formed understanding of orthographic knowledge may impede character recognition and contribute to failures in Chinese[8]. As another critical cognitive skill in reading development, morphological awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate morphemes within words and employ word
Current Medical Science 38(2):2018
formation rules[4]. Each Chinese character represents a morpheme, the smallest unit of meaning. As Chinese is relatively semantically transparent, complicated vocabulary may be formed by combining morphemes via compounding. Learning to distinguish them may be fundamentally important for Chinese reading[9]. As a core cognitive construct, morphological awareness has been reported to be strongly related with character recognition and reading comprehension in Chinese children[10]. In addition, rapid automatized naming (RAN) is defined as the speed with which individuals can name a presented set of visual items. The seemingly simple tasks to as fast as possible name a series of familiar stimuli are supposed to invoke a mini-circuit of the later-developing elaborated reading circuitry. RAN tasks and reading acquisition are considered to be involved in many of the same processes, such as from eye saccades to working memory to the integration of visual and verbal information[11]. An extensive body of research supports RAN as one of the perhaps best and universal predictors of reading fluency across various orthographies[5]. In Chinese, as in alphabetic orthographies, a large proportion of children suffer from the dyslexia[12]. And the deficits of orthographic awareness, morphological awareness and RAN have been reported as salient features of reading disability in Chinese[10, 13]. Few studies thus far have examined the development of cognitive skills in relation to reading, especially for the children in Mainland China. Tracing the development of the three linguistic skills may be useful to understand the nature development of the three core cognitive skills for reading with time or grade level. To summarize, our current study focused on the development of cognitive reading-related skills in a relatively large sample of elementary-level students in Mainland China. It aimed to develop a view of the developmental trajectories of the three core cognitive skills for Chinese children’s reading. 1 MATERIALS AND METHODS 1.1 Participants The present study belongs to the on-going Tongji project, Reading Environment and Dyslexia Study (READ)[14], which began in 2011 and has aimed to explore the impacts of environment- and gene-related factors on dyslexia. A total of 366 native Mandarinspeaking children from Wuhan, China, participated in the study. These children included 164 children (87 girls, 77 boys) who were initially in grade 1, and 202 children (92 girls, 110 boys) initially in grade 2. We recruited them from one public primary school. These students all received Chinese Mandarin as the medium of instruction at school. All of the participants had normal IQs (≥80), without any brain diseases, visual or
337 auditory dysfunctions, or psychiatric disorders. More information on these children, organized according to IQ and age, is presented in table 1. We followed the Grade 1 students’ development of cognitive reading skills at three time points: at the beginning of grade 1 (Time 1, T1), grade 2 (Time 2, T2), and grade 3 (Time 3, T3). Likewise, we followed the grade 2 students’ development at the beginning of grade 2 (Time 1, T1), grade 3 (Time 2, T2), and grade 4 (Time 3, T3). No participants had dropped out by Time 3. 1.2 Procedure At the beginning of the study, the permissions from the primary school and the signed informed consent forms were obtained from the participants and their parents or guardians. Trained graduate students and the head teacher of each class administered all of the tasks. These presenters repeated the instructions and gave examples until the children knew how to do each task. Practice trials were given before the tests to ensure the children were familiar with all of the tasks. 1.2.1 Raven’s Progressive Matrices Raven’s Progressive Matrices were administered to measure children’s nonverbal intelligence. All of the 60 items increased in their difficulty level. This test required the children to choose the best shape to complete the target matrix. The total number of correct answers was the raw score. Then the raw scores were converted to quantitative standard scores that were corrected for age norms. 1.2.2 Orthographic Awareness In the orthographic awareness task, the children viewed 80 Chinese characters, consisting of both real and not-real characters. The not-real characters contained 40 incorrect components, 19 ill-structured and 21 pseudo characters. The ill-structured components were made from replacing some components of real characters. The pseudo characters were made from combining legal radicals from real characters that were in correct positions and in accordance with orthographic rules; however, the combinations did not form real Chinese characters. The ill-structured characters contained real components, but the radicals were placed in illegal positions. The children were asked to identify which were real characters. Then, they received one mark for each correct answer 1.2.3 Morphological Awareness The morphological awareness task consisted of two practice items and twenty test items. In this task, the experimenter orally presented the child with paired two-morpheme Chinese words. Each of the two words was a morpheme that shared the same sound and written form (homographs). For example, there is a shared morpheme mian4 面 in biao3 mian4 表面 (surface) and mian4 dui4 面对 (confront). For each of the paired words, the child’s task was to judge whether the target morpheme in the words had a similar meaning or not. From each correct
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answer, one point was received. 1.2.4 RAN Five Arabic digits (2, 3, 5, 6, and 8) were arranged randomly in six rows with five digits per row on A4 paper. The participants needed to name as quickly and accurately as possible the 30 digits from left to right, row by row. We recorded errors in naming and used a stopwatch to note the overall naming time for each child. Every child read the list twice. Each individual’s score was the average of the time he or she took for both trials. 1.3 Statistical Analysis Linear mixed models were fitted to our data and were applied. Individuals in the models are considered as random effects. The analyses took into account the
non-independence of the scores of reading-related cognitive skills within the same subject. Estimates of the fixed effects in the models were included to test the differences in the average evolution of the cognitive skills among the four grades. All the models were estimated with R 3.2.2. 2 RESULTS 2.1 Descriptive Analyses Descriptive means and standard deviations of the participants’ ages and nonverbal IQs appear in table 1. There was no significant difference in gender between the children who began the project in grade 1 and those
Table 1 Descriptive statistics on characteristics of participants Grade 1 (87 girls, 77 boys, n=164) Grade 2 (92 girls, 110 boys, n=202) T1 T2 T3 T1 T2 T3 M (SD) M (SD) M (SD) M (SD) M (SD) M (SD) Age (years) 6.65 (0.38) 7.50 (0.38) 8.57 (0.38) 7.73 (0.36) 8.49 (0.36) 9.64 (0.36) Raven’s 108 (15) 115 (12) 107 (12) 110 (9) 108 (12) 102 (10) M: mean; SD: standard deviation; T1: Time 1; T2: Time 2; T3: Time 3
in grade 2 (x2=2.040, P=0.153). 2.2 Developmental Patterns on Chinese Readingrelated Cognitive Skills The grade effect was significant for the three reading-related cognitive abilities [for orthographic awareness, F(3,729)=66.47, P
