Learning to read…  Reading route characterized by the written system (Bialystock, Majumder, & Martin, 2003)  Word reading vary across languages (Wade- Wooley & Kirby, 2007; Koda, 2000)  Specific educational practices (Leong et al., 2005; Shu et al., 2003)  Word reading across alphabetic and non alphabetic languages.  Phonological awareness  Morphological awareness  Orthographic knowledge

Semantic Radicals 媽 CharactersEnglishPinyin 妈 妈妈 妈 motherma 她 sheta 姐 姐姐 姐 older sisterjiejie 妹 妹妹 妹 younger sistermeimei 女朋友 girlfriendnupengyou 妈 ma 妈 = female =

Pinyin: Tonal representation ma 媽 妈 ma1 麻 麻 ma2 馬 马 ma3 罵 骂 ma4 嗎 吗 ma (no tone) Interrogation participle hemp mother horse to scold

More about Radicals  Semantic Radicals tend to be in positions either left or top (Larger repertoire of semantic radicals -7,000 morphemes in Mandarin)  Phonetic Radicals tend to be in the right or bottom positions (1,300 different spoken syllables in Mandarin for example)  Phonetic radicals are not consistent (Shu et al., 2002)  紅 : hong2 - red 江 : ji4ang1 –  while they both have the same right radical, they do not sound the same and neither are related to the semantic radical 工 “gong” which means work

What common components are involved in bi-scriptal reading?  Phonological awareness and orthographic experience in Chinese influences process of learning to read English (Cheung, Chan & Chong, 2007; Gottardo, Chiappe, Yan, Siegel & Gu, 2006; Leong et al., 2005; Wang & Geva, 2003; Wang et al., 2005)  Chinese Phonological processing associated with Chinese pseudo-word reading and English word reading (Gottardo et al., 2001)  Chinese children learning English as L2 outperformed native English speaking children on pseudo-word spelling (Wang & Geva, 2003)

Participants Native Hong Kong Cantonese speaking children  5 upper middle class primary schools  nd graders (mean age = 96.6 mos)  th graders (mean age = )  Bilingual English and Chinese curriculum  Children are taught to read in Chinese at age of 3-4 and English at the age of 4-5 years old through the “look and say” method not phonics.

Lexical Word Measures Chinese Word Recognition  61 item Character recognition test  27 single character words & 34 two character words  150 item test Hong Kong Test of Specific Learning Difficulties in Reading and Writing (HKT-SpLD)  All two character words  All tests were arranged in increasing difficulty. Words were represented alone top to bottom/left to right English Word Reading  60 English high frequency words (K and primary school)  All tests were arranged in increasing difficulty

Cognitive Measures  Raven’s Progressive Matrices  Geometric design with a portion missing  Phonological Awareness (PA)  syllable deletion 29 three syllable words (real and nonsense words)  delete first, final or middle syllable = “Lemon tea” without “tea” would be “lemon”  syllable onset deletion- 22 items  Delete the initial sound from the syllable “po4” children would say “o4”

Cognitive Measures  Morphological Awareness (MA)  Morphological construction 27 3-sentence scenarios  Described an object/concept and create a new concept using the lexical compounding “ drawerball”  Homophone production 14 items 1 st part: Target morpheme/monosyllable shown- asked to form new words using target morpheme within 10sec 2 nd part: generate words that included homophones of target monosyllable within 10 sec. Meaning and Written form are different

 Visual Configuration Discrimination (VOS)  Discriminate real non lexical radicals and stroke patterns from a set of misspelling and incorrect non lexical radicals Cognitive Measures

Chinese Word Reading

Within Language Associations  MA was uniquely associated with Chinese character recognition in both grades  VOS strongly associated with Chinese word reading across grades Results

English Word Reading

Cross Language Associations  PA measured in Chinese strongly associated with English word reading in both grades  Strong crossover effect of Chinese VOS on English word reading  No cross-linguistic transfer from Chinese MA to English word reading Results

Both within and cross language Associations  Phonological Awareness (PA), Morphological Awareness (MA) and visual- orthographic skills (VOS) improved with age. Results

Discussion  Chinese children whose L1 is Chinese and learning to read English as L2 adopt a visual orthographic-based strategy  Discrimination of different graphic patterns stem from Chinese character recognition skills (Huang & Hanley, 1995; Siok & Fletcher) Spatial versus Linear  Instructional practices influencing reading strategies- Look and say method  Does the different types of morphological awareness inhibit the transfer?

Perfetti,C., Anderson, R.C & Leung, C.K Toronto, July 2010Reading Chinese Research