PAPER Phonological awareness in young Chinese children - CiteSeerX

Developmental Science 11:1 (2008), pp 171–181

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00654.x

PAPER Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Phonological awareness in young Chinese children Hua Shu,1 Hong Peng1,2 and Catherine McBride-Chang3 1. State Key Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, PR China 2. Beijing Disabled Persons Rehabilitation Service & Guidance Center, PR China 3. Department of Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Abstract Two studies explored the nature of phonological awareness (PA) in Chinese. In Study 1, involving 146 children, awareness of phoneme onset did not differ from chance levels at ages 3–5 years in preschool but increased to 70% correct in first grade, when children first received phonological coding (Pinyin) instruction. Similarly, tone awareness was at better than chance levels from second year kindergarten (age 4), but increased strongly and significantly in first grade to 74% accuracy. In contrast, syllable and rime awareness increased gradually and steadily across ages 3–6 years. Patterns suggest different influences of age and literacy instruction for different PA levels. In Study 2, involving 202 preschoolers, variance in Chinese character recognition was best explained by tasks of syllable awareness, tone awareness, and speeded naming. Findings underscore the unique importance of both tone and syllable for early character acquisition in Chinese children.

Introduction Although the importance of phonological awareness for very early word recognition has been established across orthographies (e.g. Ziegler & Goswami, 2005), the nature and relevance of phonological awareness in Chinese has received relatively little attention thus far. In English, for example, there has been an ongoing debate about whether awareness at the rhyme or phoneme level is particularly important for word recognition (e.g. Anthony & Lonigan, 2004; Goswami, 2002; Muter, Hulme, Snowling & Taylor, 1997). The same debate is less relevant for Chinese, because children do not need awareness of phoneme-size units to read Chinese. That is, Chinese is morphosyllabic – divisible at the syllable, not the phoneme, level (e.g. Leong, 1997; McBrideChang, Bialystok, Chong & Li, 2004). At the same time, however, sensitivity to tone, an integral feature of Chinese language that is absent from Indoeuropean languages, represents a level of phonological information that may facilitate reading in Chinese. In Mandarin (Putonghua) Chinese, four tones are clearly distinguished, and these tones are integral to production and comprehension of speech (Fu & Huang, 2000). However, despite the centrality of tone for Chinese language, there is relatively little information on the extent to which sensitivity to linguistic tone, as compared to other levels of phonological awareness, is associated with reading development in Chinese. In the present study, we explore the development and inter-

relations of four aspects of phonological sensitivity in Chinese 3- to 6-year-olds. In Study 1, we examine the development of these levels in relation to age and Pinyin instruction. In Study 2, we then explore the contributions of three levels of early phonological awareness in explaining variability in early Chinese word recognition among children without formal reading instruction.

Study 1: Phonological awareness development Across languages, there are different levels of phonological awareness (Høien, Lundberg, Stanovich & Bjaalid, 1995; Treiman & Zukowski, 1991). In alphabetic languages, an argument has been made for the importance of phoneme-level awareness over other levels of phonological awareness in explaining variance in reading skills (Høien et al., 1995). However, such conclusions may not apply across languages and orthographies (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). For example, one correlational study of kindergarten and second grade children demonstrated that both syllable- and phoneme-(onset, coda) level awareness uniquely accounted for variance in Korean Hangul reading (Cho & McBride-Chang, 2005). In another study (McBride-Chang et al., 2004), across three Chinese samples, syllable awareness, but not phoneme onset awareness, explained unique variance in Chinese character recognition among kindergarten and first grade readers. Indeed, several studies have demonstrated strong links between syllable awareness and Chinese

Address for correspondence: Catherine McBride-Chang, Psychology Department, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, NT, Hong Kong; e-mail: [email protected] © 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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character recognition in early readers (Chow, McBrideChang & Burgess, 2005; McBride-Chang & Ho, 2000; McBride-Chang & Kail, 2002). Measurement of phonological awareness is challenging because the method of measurement may influence the difficulty level of the task. For example, forced choice tasks of phonological awareness often yield lower reliability estimates than do those that require the participant to construct an answer (an open-ended response). At the same time, however, very young children are most appropriately tested using forced choice paradigms because such receptive tasks tend to be easiest for them to understand and/or respond to. Thus, in the first study, we examined four types of phonological sensitivity using the forced choice method of measurement for children aged 3 to 6. What is the nature of phonological awareness with development? Most studies that have considered this question in young children have focused on English phonological awareness. For example, Anthony and colleagues (Anthony & Lonigan, 2004; Anthony, Lonigan, Burgess, Driscoll, Phillips & Cantor, 2002) have demonstrated that phonological awareness in English is measurable in children as young as 2 years old. They also argue that awareness of different levels of speech sounds (e.g. phoneme, onset, syllable) all comprise a single phonological construct. Many studies have demonstrated that phonemic awareness increases are attributable to both age and reading experience (see Castles & Coltheart, 2004, for a review). However, from a developmental perspective, it may be that different aspects of phonological awareness are more or less influenced by age changes as compared to educational experiences (e.g. Morrison, Smith & Dow-Ehrensberger, 1995). For example, in English, although awareness of syllables seems to emerge naturally with development, phoneme-level awareness is at least partly attributable to literacy instruction (Morrison et al., 1995; Treiman & Zukowski, 1991). Few studies have focused explicitly on development in relation to phonological awareness in Chinese. One cross-cultural study that included both kindergarten and first grade Chinese students in Xian, Hong Kong, and Toronto (McBride-Chang et al., 2004) showed that first graders performed better than kindergartners on both phoneme onset and syllable deletion tasks. Both age and academic grade level were associated with phonological awareness. Other studies of Chinese children in preschool and primary school have most commonly measured rime awareness (e.g. Ho & Bryant, 1997; Hu & Catts, 1998; Siok & Fletcher, 2001; So & Siegel, 1997) as well as tone (Chen, Anderson, Li, Hao, Wu & Shu, 2004; Fu & Huang, 2000; Leong, Cheng & Tan, 2005; Li, Anderson, Nagy & Zhang, 2002; So & Siegel, 1997; Wang, Perfetti & Liu, 2005). Siok and Fletcher (2001), focusing on levels of phonological awareness in relation to Chinese character recognition in children grades 1–5, asserted that onset-rhyme awareness was important in younger readers, and tone awareness was more clearly © 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

associated with reading in older primary school readers. They also found that tone performance tended to be better than that of onset-rhyme across grade levels. However, their task of onset-rhyme included both Chinese and English items, making an explicit comparison of Chinese phonological awareness performance potentially difficult. In addition, they were studying children who had had formal reading instruction for a relatively extended period of time, so they did not include syllable awareness, a fairly easy task, explicitly in that study. In the present study, we examined Chinese children’s phonological awareness at the levels of syllable, rime, onset, and tone in children aged 3 to 6. Our preschoolers were divided into three levels based on year of kindergarten and had received no formal literacy instruction at school. In contrast, the 6-year-olds were in first grade and were receiving training in Pinyin. We anticipated different patterns of differences across the age groups for different levels of phonological awareness based on previous findings. Syllable-level awareness appears to develop early across languages (e.g. Treiman & Zukowski, 1991) partly because the syllable is the natural unit of speech (e.g. Boysson-Bardies, 1999). In Chinese, the syllable may be particularly salient because the syllable almost always represents a morpheme as well. The strong salience of the syllable in Chinese language may highlight it for young Chinese children. We therefore hypothesized that syllable awareness would develop primarily as a function of experience with language, rather than as a function of literacy exposure. Rime and onset within a Chinese syllable were also a developmental focus of the present study for two reasons. First, as discussed by Siok and Fletcher (2001), traditionally, both Chinese dictionaries and linguists who focus on Chinese divide the Chinese syllable into onset and rime in describing the pronunciation of a character, underscoring the potential phonological importance of these units, at least for adults. As a parallel to this, Pinyin, the phonological coding system used in China, which uses a Roman alphabet to teach character names, often highlights the onset–rime distinction in writing. That is, characters are often presented in Pinyin as divided into onset and rime. Second, in their study of children in grades 1 to 5, Siok and Fletcher (2001) demonstrated that children’s sensitivity to these units did not differ across familiar and unfamiliar stimuli. They interpreted this finding to mean that reading experience may not strongly influence awareness of these units. However, unlike the study by Siok and Fletcher (2001), in which all participants had had at least some exposure to Pinyin, the present study targeted much younger children, many of whom had not yet learned this system. Thus, we were particularly interested in the extent to which children would demonstrate changes in sensitivity to onsets and rimes with development and formal Pinyin training. There is ample evidence that phonological coding training, including both Pinyin and also Zhuyin-Fuhao,

Phonological awareness in Chinese children

a system of phonological coding at the onset-rime level and used for literacy instruction in Taiwan, facilitates onset awareness among young Chinese children across cultures. For example, Huang and Hanley (1995) demonstrated that Chinese children taught to use a phonological coding system were significantly better able to delete phonemes from Chinese syllables than were Hong Kong children, who do not learn a phonological coding system in school. Previous research (McBride-Chang et al., 2004) had already demonstrated grade-related differences, apart from age itself, in phoneme onset deletion among Chinese kindergarten and first grade students. Thus, we expected to observe significantly better phoneme onset awareness in first grade students in the present study in comparison to younger children who had not yet received such literacy instruction. At the same time, however, rhyme awareness seems to develop with age, prior to literacy instruction, at least in English (Goswami & Bryant, 1990). We sought to determine the extent to which the same would be true for Chinese in the present study. A final level of phonological awareness, tone awareness, may be especially important for young Chinese children because it is a suprasegmental unit that distinguishes meanings across words. In previous research on Cantonese (Ciocca & Lui, 2003), tone awareness was demonstrated to increase with age in children. However, Pinyin training might additionally improve tone awareness because such training makes explicit tonal contrasts across morphemes or words that may have been only vaguely lexically represented before such instruction. That is, in addition to emphasizing the segmental units in a Chinese syllable as onset and rime using the Roman alphabet, Pinyin instruction highlights tonal comparisons by explicitly indicating which of four tones is indicated by the syllable (e.g. Siok & Fletcher, 2001). For example, the syllable ma1 means mother, ma2 means numb, ma3 means horse, and ma4 means scold. Thus, learning Pinyin may make implicitly learned lexical tones explicit and, thus, highlight the salience of tone for young children. This may be particularly important when children confront homophones as in the previous example, because lexical tone is the only way to distinguish across the different meanings of the syllable. For this reason, we hypothesized that 6-year-old Chinese children, who had been formally introduced to Pinyin, would demonstrate significantly better tone awareness than would younger children in the present study.

Method Participants One hundred and forty-six Chinese children from Beijing were included in the study. These children were from four school levels. In China, kindergartens are independent schools consisting of three grade levels. Formal literacy © 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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instruction is not given at these schools. Participants were from one large kindergarten and one primary school. The primary school had students whose family backgrounds were roughly equivalent to those of the kindergartners in terms of socioeconomic status and education levels of parents. Across schools, most parents were middle class and well educated (high school graduates and above). The K1 (first kindergarten level) children ranged in age from 39 to 47 months. There were 38 (21 male; 17 female) K1 students. Of the 39 K2 (second year of kindergarten) children ages 48 to 59 months, 22 were male and 17 were female. In K3 (third level of kindergarten), there were 21 male and 18 female children ages 60 to 71 months. Finally, there were 30 first grade children, ages 72 to 90 months. Of these, 15 were male and 15 were female. We refer to these students across these four levels of K1, K2, K3, and P1 (for primary 1) throughout the paper. Procedure Once permission from the schools and individual parents was obtained to include the children in this study, children were tested on four different phonological awareness tasks individually in a quiet room at school by three trained psychology undergraduate majors. All of the phonological awareness tasks consisted of two practice trials and eight experimental trials, with the exception of tone detection, which consisted of two practice trials and 12 experimental trials. For each task, children were first presented with a target syllable, which was paired with its picture. They were then given two syllable choices, which were also paired with their pictures. Children were asked to carefully listen to each syllable and then identify which of the two selections sounded more similar to the target, ignoring their meanings. Children responded by pointing to the picture they selected, and the experimenters recorded children’s responses. All of the auditory stimuli were presented by live voice from the experimenters with standard Mandarin Chinese. Although these auditory tasks can be performed without pictures (e.g. when they are used for elementary school children), we included pictures of all items across all tasks in order to ease the memory load of these for young children. All pictures were semantically unrelated, familiar to the children, and consisted of simple line drawings of common nouns. In the practice trials, the experimenters went over the sounds very slowly, and gave ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ feedback following a child’s response. If a child’s response was not correct, the experimenter repeated this trial again but did not explain why he/she had made an incorrect response. Tasks included the following: Syllable detection. In this task, children were asked to carefully listen to each two-syllable word and then select which of the two sounded more similar to the target two-syllable word. For example, a target, lao3shu3

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Table 1 Study 1: Means and standard deviations of percentages correct for children ages 3–6 years on four levels of phonological awareness K1

Syllable detection Rime detection Onset detection Tone detection

Figure 1

K2

K3

P1

Reliability

Mean

SD

T

Mean

SD

T

Mean

SD

T

Mean

SD

T

0.74 0.49 0.28 0.37

0.61 0.53 0.57 0.52

0.26 0.18 0.16 0.12

2.67* 1.07 2.62* 0.77

0.8 0.64 0.51 0.58

0.21 0.23 0.13 0.13

9.12*** 3.86*** 0.57 3.88***

0.89 0.63 0.53 0.55

0.19 0.23 0.15 0.15

12.92*** 3.47*** 1.34 2.11*

0.92 0.73 0.7 0.74

0.16 0.22 0.2 0.19

14.88*** 5.88*** 5.57*** 7.26***

An example of the syllable detection task.

(mouse), was orally presented with its accompanying picture to the children, followed by two other two-syllable words lao3ying1 (eagle) and shi1zi (lion), accompanied by their respective pictures. Children were then asked to select, from two choices – lao3ying1 or shi1zi – the word that sounded more similar to the target lao3shu3. The answer, in this case, is lao3ying1, because it contains the syllable lao3. The accompanying pictures for this example are shown in Figure 1. In four trials, the correct choice (e.g. lao3ying1) shared the same first syllable with the target word (e.g. lao3shu3), and in another four trials, the correct choice (e.g. wo1niu2) shared the same second syllable with the target word (e.g. nai3niu2). Rime detection. In this task, children were also asked to carefully listen to each syllable and identify which of the selections sounded more similar to the target syllable. For example, the target mao1 (cat) was presented aloud, with its picture, to children. It was then followed by two syllables, shan1 (mountain) and bao1 (bag), with their accompanying pictures. Children were then asked to select, from two choices – shan1 or bao1 – the syllable that sounded more similar to the target mao1. To make the task simple, the tone was kept constant across all three syllables. In this case, bao1 is the correct answer because its rime matches that of mao1. Onset detection. Similarly, in this task, children were asked to listen to each syllable and identify which of the selections sounded more similar to the target syllable. For example, following the presentation of the target bao1 (bag) with its picture, two other syllables, bei1 (cup) and yan1 (cigarette), were presented with their accompanying pictures. Children were then asked to select, from two choices – bei1 or yan1 – the syllable that sounded more similar to the target bao1. To keep the task simple, © 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

the tone was constant across all three syllables; rimes were randomly changed. In this case, the answer is bei1, because, like bao1, it begins with the same initial phoneme. Tone detection. This task consisted of two practice trials and 12 experimental trials. The task and instructions were the same as those above. The rime was the same across all three syllables for this task. Children were orally presented with a target, such as hu3 (tiger), along with its accompanying picture, followed by two syllables, gu3 (drum) and ku4 (trousers), with their respective pictures. Children were then asked to select the item (gu3 or ku4) that sounded more similar to the target hu3. In this case, gu3 is the correct answer because it shares the third tone with hu3. With both tone and onset changing across the three syllables, this task of tone was likely relatively challenging, as demonstrated previously by Siok and Fletcher (2001). Results and discussion Means and standard deviations for these four phonological awareness tasks are presented in Table 1 by age. Because the tasks were two-choice forced choice tasks, we corrected for guessing for all analyses. The results showed that for the syllable task, even first year (K1) kindergartners scored above chance. By second year kindergarten (K2), syllable awareness was very strong, on average at or above 80% from K2 through first grade (P1). Improvement on the rime task appeared to be slower. Unlike their performance on the syllable awareness task, K1 children were at chance on rime detection (53%). In contrast, those in K2 and K3 scored above chance (64% and 63%, respectively). The first graders appeared to improve still more (73%). Tone awareness followed a somewhat similar pattern to that of rhyme awareness, with children achieving performances consistently above chance by second year kindergarten and a marked improvement with schooling in first grade (74%). Finally, children below first grade were not consistently above chance on the phoneme onset sensitivity task, though their performance improved dramatically in P1, with a performance of 70% correct. A two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) of Grade level × Level of phonological awareness was carried out with the rate of correct responses as the dependent variable. It was found that the main effect of grade level [F(3, 142) = 20.78, p < .001], the main effect of


phonological awareness [F(3, 426) = 55.21, p < .01] and the interaction effect [F(9, 426) = 5.14, p < .001] were significant. Post-hoc comparisons using the TUKEY test showed that the K1 children differed significantly from all higher grade levels on syllable level detection (all ps < .001), and the K2, K3, and P1 groups did not differ from one another. Similarly, on the rime detection task, only K1 children differed significantly from the first graders (p < .01). In contrast, the first graders were significantly different from the K1–K3 groups on phoneme onset (all ps < .001) and tone level detection (all ps < .001), and the kindergarten-level students did not differ from one another on these tasks. These results suggest that change in phonological awareness in Chinese at different levels may depend upon different processes. Rime and syllable awareness may be most influenced by age or informal experience with language. In contrast, onset awareness may develop primarily as a result of formal educational experience (e.g. Huang & Hanley, 1995). Our findings appear to demonstrate the importance of literacy training, in the form of Pinyin teaching, for tone awareness as well. Tone processing clearly demonstrated strong improvement from third year kindergarten (age 5), when children had not yet received formal schooling, to first grade at age 6, when Pinyin had been introduced. These findings, particularly in relation to previous literature, suggest that both syllable and rhyme awareness develop primarily as a function of age, as found previously in studies of Indoeuropean-speaking children (e.g. Goswami & Bryant, 1990; Treiman & Zukowski, 1991). In contrast, both phoneme onset sensitivity and tone awareness appear to increase dramatically with the onset of instruction. For example, when no phonological coding system is taught to Chinese children, most Chinese children perform very poorly on measures of phoneme onset (e.g. Huang & Hanley, 1995; McBride-Chang et al., 2004). Although tone awareness varies as a function of age (e.g. Ciocca & Lui, 2003), literacy instruction that makes tone awareness explicit appears to boost such awareness dramatically. Are different levels of phonological awareness also associated differently with early character recognition? Having observed possible differences in the trajectories of different levels of phonological awareness in Chinese, we turned to this second issue that has relevance for understanding literacy development: How are different levels of phonological awareness related to word recognition among young Chinese children? To examine this question, we tested 3–5-year-olds on a battery of reading-related skills and Chinese character recognition in Study 2.

Study 2: Phonological awareness in early character acquisition Numerous studies demonstrate a link between phonological awareness and character recognition in Chinese children (e.g. Ho & Bryant, 1997; Hu & Catts, 1998; © 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Huang & Hanley, 1997; McBride-Chang & Ho, 2000). However, across such studies, both techniques of measurement and the levels of phonological awareness tested have differed substantially. For example, as discussed in relation to Study 1, in very young children, forced choice paradigms are usually most successful in highlighting variability of responses. On the other hand, open-ended methods, in which children are asked to derive an answer themselves, are desirable to the extent that they are possible for young children to use because they increase variability of responses and, thus, reliability of measures. In Study 2, based on pilot data, we found that, because of the early salience of the syllable, syllable awareness in young Chinese children can be measured using an openended method. Thus, we used this method of measuring syllable sensitivity to improve reliability in the present study. In contrast, we retained the same measures of rhyme and tone sensitivity from Study 1 in Study 2. Finally, we dropped our measure of phoneme onset sensitivity in the present study based on the findings from Study 1 that children below the age of 6 did not consistently perform above chance on this measure. Thus, in Study 2, our primary focus was the extent to which awareness of rime, tone, and syllable independently explains variability in reading among young Chinese children. The independent importance of each level of awareness is not necessarily clear. For example, although the concept of the rime unit may sometimes be useful in explaining early reading or spelling skills in English, where children may use analogies at the rime level (e.g. fight, sight, might all contain the same rime unit, ight, that can be generalized across words), there are few parallel analogies of this rime unit to character acquisition in Chinese. Theoretically, then, it is less reasonable to expect that the unit of rime in Chinese might be a strong early predictor of character recognition than that rime acquisition would be fundamental for learning to read in English. Practically, identifying the units of phonological awareness most strongly associated with early literacy development in Chinese may help practitioners to screen children who may be at-risk for reading problems early. In the present study, rime detection was included in our battery of phonological awareness tasks because it was uniquely associated with Chinese character recognition in a longitudinal study of Hong Kong children, from age 3 to 7 (Ho & Bryant, 1997). Tone was also included as a correlate of Chinese word recognition because it has been shown to be associated with reading among older Chinese children in some previous studies (e.g. Leong et al., 2005; Siok & Fletcher, 2001; So & Siegel, 1997). However, the extent to which this measure would be uniquely associated with Chinese character recognition, beyond the variance accounted for by other measures of phonological awareness, was unclear. We hypothesized that, because of the many homophones in Chinese and the importance of tone for distinguishing among homophones represented by different characters in Chinese, tone awareness might be a

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significant correlate of reading skill among young children in the present study. The third phonological awareness task included was syllable deletion. This task has been demonstrated to predict unique variance in young children’s reading of Chinese in both correlational (McBride-Chang et al., 2004; McBride-Chang & Ho, 2000; McBride-Chang & Kail, 2002) and longitudinal (Chow et al., 2005; McBride-Chang & Ho, 2005) studies. However, one problem with the syllable deletion task as it is often presented is that syllables and morphemes consistently overlap in Chinese. Thus, unlike English, where children could be asked to delete a syllable that is not a morpheme (e.g. the /di/ in candy is not an independent unit of meaning), every syllable children are asked to delete from Chinese words represents a morpheme. In order to measure syllable awareness apart from morphemes, then, in the present study, we included both real and nonsense words from which children were asked to delete a syllable. In addition to phonological awareness, speeded naming has been linked to reading acquisition in Chinese children. Speeded naming requires children to name a few common symbols repeated and randomly alternated, usually presented on a sheet of paper. These symbols might be graphological, such as Roman numerals, letters of the Roman alphabet, or Chinese radicals, or nongraphological, including blocks of color or pictures of objects. Speeded naming tends to distinguish good from poor readers across Chinese societies (e.g. Ho & Bryant, 1999; Ho, Chan, Lee, Tsang & Hui, 2004; Shu, Meng & Lai, 2003). Speeded naming is also a fairly strong correlate of Chinese character recognition among young readers of varying abilities (Chow et al., 2005; McBride-Chang & Ho, 2000). Speeded naming is a strong predictor of early reading perhaps because it is linked to children’s ability to automatize information. In addition, some researchers conceptualize speeded naming tasks as primarily tapping phonological skills (e.g. Wagner & Torgesen, 1987), whereas others highlight the fact that such tasks require quick visual sequencing, and visual skills may be another important requirement for early Chinese character recognition (Ho et al., 2004). To summarize, in Study 2, we examined the contributions of three different phonological awareness skills, in addition to speeded naming (Wagner & Torgesen, 1987) to word recognition in Chinese. We were particularly interested in which of the three levels of phonological awareness would uniquely explain reading performance in these very young children, with vocabulary knowledge statistically controlled.

Method Participants Two hundred and two K1 (first year kindergarten) to K3 (third year kindergarten) Chinese children from Beijing © 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

were included in the sample. Of these, there were 30 boys and 30 girls ages 40–47 months in K1, 42 boys and 34 girls ages 48–59 months in K2, and 34 boys and 32 girls of ages 60–78 months in K3. The children all came from two kindergarten schools in Beijing. These schools have a kindergarten program of focus on early school readiness skills, and teach through play. Thus, the students enjoy musical activities, story times with teachers, art activities, and other organized play. During many of these activities, such as story time, children were exposed to Chinese characters. However, formal literacy instruction is not provided at these schools. Procedure All children were tested individually on a variety of language tasks in a quiet room at school during school hours by trained undergraduate psychology majors. Children were given the following tasks in a 30-minute session: Phonological awareness. Three tasks of phonological awareness were administered. Two of these, rime and tone detection, were identical to those described in Study 1. The third task was a syllable deletion measure. There were 16 items in this syllable deletion measure. Half of them were real words, and the other half were nonsense words. For both real and nonsense words, children were asked to take away the first syllable (e.g. dian4hua4 (telephone) without the dian4 (electric) is hua4 (speech)) for half of the items and to take away the second syllable in half the items. Rapid automatized naming. To test children’s rapid naming skills, we included a picture-naming test. In this test, three rows of the same five pictures, presented in different orders, were presented (McBride-Chang, Shu, Zhou,Wat & Wagner, 2003). These five pictures included a monkey, watermelon, rainbow, apple, and pencil. In Chinese, all of these nouns comprise two syllables. Children were asked to name all of the pictures, across the three rows, as quickly as possible. Children were timed on their naming skills using a stopwatch. They were given two separate trials, and these trials were averaged for the analysis. Vocabulary. A test of receptive vocabulary was also constructed for this study. The test consisted of 60 oneto three-syllable words presented with pictures. For each target word, four pictures, the target, a phonological distracter, a semantic distracter, and an unrelated distracter, were presented to the child. The child was then asked to point to the target item for each trial. Items were selected based on a pilot test in which 20 were only familiar to 5-year-olds, 20 were also familiar to 4-yearolds, and 20 were even familiar to 3-year-old children. All of the target words were single character words, compound words with morphemes that were semantically less transparent, or words consisting of morphemes that were not familiar to children (Hao, 2003). In one example, for the target word hai3tun2 (dolphin), the phonological


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Table 3a Study 2: Correlations among all tasks for K1 students controlling for age

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Syllable deletion Rime detection Tone detection Rapid naming Vocabulary Character recognition

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

– .47*** .21 −.48*** .42*** .56***

– .25* −.13 .37** .31*

– −.30* .31* .28*

– −.42** −.46***

– .30*

* p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001.

Table 3b Study 2: Correlations among all tasks for K2 students controlling for age 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

– .23* .19 −.31** .47*** .50***

– .27* −.27* .02 .22

– −.28* .16 .31**

– −.29* −.33**

– .38**

Figure 2 An example of the vocabulary task. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

distracter is hai2zi1 (children), the semantic distracter is hai3ma3 (seahorse), and the unrelated distracter is fo2xiang4 (buddha) (see Figure 2). Chinese character recognition. This test consisted of 60 single-character words that were judged to be orally familiar to the children. In a pilot study, 300 singlecharacter words, which were orally familiar to children, were initially selected from first grade textbooks. Eighteen K1–K3-level children, six in each kindergarten level, were asked to name the characters. The range of accuracy in naming was from 0% to 94%. Sixty single character words in the test were then selected based on children’s performance of these, 18 were from the characters with 0%–39% accuracy, 21 were from the characters with 40%–60% accuracy, and 21 were from the characters with 61%–94% accuracy. The characters in the test were listed in increasing level of difficulty. Children were asked to read from the beginning of the test and complete the entire test.


* p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001.

Table 3c Study 2: Correlations among all tasks for K3 students controlling for age

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.


1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

– .27* .15 −.40** .45*** .37**

– .34** −.25 .23 .30*

– .01 −.04 .25*

– −.33* −.27*

– .36**

* p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001.

Results and discussion

Tables 3a–c show correlations among all tasks separately for all kindergarten levels. Preliminary analyses showed that nonsense word and real word syllable awareness scores showed virtually identical associations across tasks. Therefore, these items were collapsed in the

Table 2 shows the means, standard deviations, and internal consistency reliabilities for children separately for those in K1, K2, and K3. With grade level, scores improved across most tasks.

Table 2 Study 2: Means and standard deviations of all tasks separately by age K1


K2

K3

Reliability

F-value (df )

Mean

SD

Mean

SD

Mean

SD

0.96 0.49 0.34 0.87 0.90 0.98

26.58*** 14.27*** 7.52*** 51.19*** 47.61*** 21.12***

0.40 0.52 0.52 24.49 0.51 0.16

0.33 0.17 0.13 5.00 0.14 0.22

0.65 0.62 0.57 19.95 0.64 0.36

0.35 0.20 0.14 4.04 0.15 0.28

0.83 0.70 0.62 16.69 0.76 0.48

0.26 0.19 0.16 2.98 0.13 0.25

© 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Table 4 Study 2: Final standardized beta weights explaining Chinese character recognition from metalinguistic skills Variables Age Rime detection Syllable deletion Tone detection Rapid naming Vocabulary

Beta weights

T

.07 .06 .34 .14 −.15 .13

1.00 .95 4.63*** 2.50* −1.95* 1.76

Note: R2 = .46; * p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001.

measure of syllable awareness shown across tables. Because the associations across tasks were relatively similar for different grade levels, we conducted regression analyses explaining variance in Chinese character recognition for the groups combined, with age statistically controlled. We did not have a priori ideas on a fixed order of variables for explaining early Chinese character recognition, because these children were beginning readers. Thus, we included all tasks in the regression equation explaining variance in very early Chinese character recognition. Final standardized beta weights for this equation are shown in Table 4. With all variables included, those that emerged as the strongest correlates of reading for these very young children were rapid naming, tone detection, and syllable deletion. In order to investigate the unique variance of Chinese character recognition accounted for by phonological awareness, we conducted hierarchical multiple regression analyses with syllable deletion and tone detection alternately included. In the first model, the results (Table 5) showed that syllable deletion was significant after age, vocabulary knowledge and rapid naming were entered as the first step, and tone detection was entered as the second step. In the second model, the results showed that tone detection was still significant after age, vocabulary, and rapid naming as the first step, and syllable deletion as the second step were controlled. In both cases, syllable deletion contributed a unique 7% and tone detection a unique 3% of the variance in the equation, suggesting that these skills contribute somewhat independently to explaining early Chinese character recognition.

A novel finding from the present study was the fact that both tone detection and syllable deletion skills independently explained variance in early Chinese character recognition. To our knowledge, this is among the first studies to include both skills in the same study. Given the relatively large number of cognitive measures included in the battery, it is particularly noteworthy that both awareness of tones and awareness of syllable independently explained word recognition in beginning readers. The nature of the Chinese orthography, reflecting a language that is morphosyllabic and tonal, makes it easy to understand why the ability to detect and manipulate speech sounds at both levels might be important for early reading. A clear and consistent mapping of one syllable to one character would likely facilitate early character identification. This has been found in several previous studies (Chow et al., 2005; McBride-Chang & Ho, 2000; McBride-Chang & Kail, 2002). More interesting, however, is the prominence of tone detection for early character recognition. Without being able to distinguish syllables with the same (C) V (C) structure based on tone, children might routinely confuse characters with the syllables to which they are mapped (e.g. Chen et al., 2004). Tonal awareness appears to be essential for distinguishing speech syllables and mapping them to their correct representations in print, even among beginning readers of Chinese.

General discussion Taken together, these studies suggest two important facets of literacy development in relation to phonological awareness among Chinese children. First, different levels of phonological awareness appear to have different developmental trajectories. In particular, the development of syllable awareness and rime awareness appears to depend primarily upon maturational age, rather than literacy exposure. In contrast, awareness of both phoneme onset and tone increases strongly with schooling. Second, along with speeded naming, both syllable awareness and tone awareness independently explain variability in early Chinese character recognition, even with verbal knowledge statistically controlled.

Table 5 Study 2: Hierarchical regression explaining Chinese character recognition from metalinguistic skills Steps

R2

R2 Change

Model 1

1. age, vocabulary knowledge, Rapid naming 2. Tone detection 3. Syllable deletion

0.36 0.39 0.46

.36*** .03** .07***

Model 2

1. age, vocabulary knowledge, Rapid naming 2. Syllable deletion 3. Tone detection

0.36 0.43 0.46

.36*** .07*** .03**

* p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001.



Findings on phonological awareness development complement and extend previous research. For example, our demonstration, based on cross-sectional data, that, with age, awareness of syllable and awareness of rime may naturally improve is in line with others’ findings on English (Goswami & Bryant, 1990; Treiman & Zukowski, 1991). Moreover, across languages, it appears that awareness of both speech syllables and rimes may reach ceiling levels relatively early in development, perhaps by the age of 5 or 6. Given the ‘primacy’ of the syllable (Boysson-Bardies, 1999) across languages, rapid early development of syllable awareness may be a ‘universal’ of language development. We are less bold in considering the development of rime awareness across cultures. In Korean, for example, the body structure (onset plus vowel) tends to be particularly important for early reading development because of the structure of the Korean language; in this case, rime is less prominent (Yoon, Bolger, Kwon & Perfetti, 2002). Our findings on phoneme onset sensitivity also fit well with previous research demonstrating that phoneme awareness may be a consequence, as well as a cause, of reading instruction (see review by Castles & Coltheart, 2004; Morrison et al., 1995). A focus on Pinyin among the first graders included in the present study appears to have had a relatively strong influence on children’s manipulation of phoneme onset units in ways similar to those documented previously for English. Our findings on tone detection have no direct parallels to previous work on phonological awareness in alphabetic orthographies. However, results from Study 1, along with those of Ciocca and Lui (2003), suggest that tone awareness is influenced at least in part by maturation, but also that explicit teaching (i.e. using Pinyin) of tones may focus children explicitly on the tonal aspect of their native language (e.g. Siok & Fletcher, 2001). The present study has also demonstrated that syllable awareness and tone awareness may be independent markers of early reading facility in Chinese children. Rather than being universal, such findings may be specific to reading in particular orthographies. For example, given the morphosyllabic and tonal structure of spoken Chinese, awareness of these speech units may be essential for early reading of Chinese, as discussed above. Future research should extend these findings by exploring children’s reading development in the first years of formal reading instruction as well. With the onset of two-character word reading, morphological awareness skills may also facilitate reading among older children. There were some limitations of the present research. First, the reliability estimates of many of our forced choice phonological awareness tasks were relatively low. Given that, due to their very young ages, these children were given only two pictures from which to select for each item, these low reliabilities are not surprising. The explicit measure of syllable deletion demonstrated a higher reliability estimate in part because children were © 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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asked to produce each answer, so elements of guessing were eliminated. Future research should improve these tasks to increase reliability estimates, perhaps by increasing the picture choices children are given for each item. Given the relatively low reliability of the tone detection task, how children’s early tone sensitivity develops and its effects on early Chinese reading require further investigation in future research using more sensitive and reliable tasks. Second, the data presented were crosssectional and correlational. Thus, no causal assertions about these data can be made. Indeed, it is likely that reading skill and phonological awareness at both the syllable and tone levels are bidirectionally associated, as found in numerous previous studies on alphabetic orthographies (for a review, see Castles & Coltheart, 2004). To further explore development of phonological awareness in Chinese, longitudinal studies of different levels of phonological awareness in relation to subsequent Chinese character acquisition are essential. In addition, in order to be maximally comprehensive, future studies should include other reading-related abilities, such as cognitive visual or memory skills, to establish the strongest correlates of Chinese character recognition. Finally, the effects of age and education level on phonological awareness cannot be definitively disentangled in the present study because younger children (kindergarten levels 1–3) all had received no Pinyin training, whereas all first graders had. Thus, although we could examine age-related trends, we cannot establish the primacy of instruction for phoneme onset awareness or the importance of both instruction and age for tone awareness based on this study alone. Despite these limitations, however, this study has extended the literature on literacy acquisition in Chinese because it has addressed the early development of phonological awareness in relation to reading of Chinese in a systematic way. For example, although others have acknowledged the importance of tone in Chinese (e.g. Ho & Bryant, 1997; Siok & Fletcher, 2001), few have sought to demonstrate its importance relative to other levels of phonological awareness more typically measured based on studies of Indoeuropean languages. Our findings fit well with the ‘Psycholinguistic Grain Size Theory’ (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005), which acknowledges the importance of different units of orthography in relation to phonology across cultures. The present study underscores the importance of larger linguistic units, including the syllable and tone, which is suprasegmental for early reading acquisition. Although awareness of smaller phonological units of speech, such as phoneme onsets and rimes, becomes explicit fairly early in Chinese children’s development as a consequence of Pinyin training, these units may play a less important role in Chinese early reading acquisition than do larger linguistic units. Such a phenomenon is in marked contrast to that typically found for reading of alphabetic languages and, as such, underscores the relevance of the grain size theory both for theory and practice.

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Appendix Material for the tone detection task

Acknowledgements This research was partially supported by RGC grant no. 4257/03H from the Hong Kong government, by the grant from the National Science Foundation of China (30470574, 60534080), by the National Pandeng Project (95-special-09), and by a department grant from the Psychology Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

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