The Differential Influence of Cognitive Factors on Chinese Reading and Writing
JUN REN LEE

Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan

Abstract

Previous research has identified several cognitive psychological factors that influence Chinese reading, including orthographic, phonological, morphological awareness, and rapid automatic naming. Generally, these influencing factors are similar to those found in English reading studies. However, the weight of influence each cognitive factor has on reading differs between the two languages. For example, meta-analytic studies have shown that although phonological awareness is still correlated with Chinese character recognition, the correlation coefficient is lower than in English.
This study divides reading into three aspects: reading comprehension, character recognition accuracy, and character recognition fluency, and also includes dictation ability as a dependent variable. The research targeted third-grade elementary school students, with participants divided into a group with a dyslexic group and a typically developing control group. The study examined the effects of nonverbal intelligence, math computation, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, orthographic knowledge, and morphological awareness on those dependent variables.
The results showed statistically significant differences between groups across all variables. Regression analyses revealed that morphological awareness emerged as the most important predictor for all four literacy-related outcomes after controlling for intelligence and math ability. The findings and the implications of these findings will be presented and discussed at the conference.

Keywords: reading development, cognitive analysis

Topic: Nature, Equity, and Policy in Education