Specific reading difficulties in Chinese, English, or both: longitudinal markers of phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and RAN in Hong Kong Chinese children.

What are the longitudinal cognitive profiles of Hong Kong Chinese children with specific reading difficulties in Chinese only, in English only, or both? A total of 16 poor readers each of Chinese (PC) and English (PE) and 8 poor readers of both orthographies (PB) were compared to a control sample (C) of 16 children; all were drawn from a statistically representative sample of 154 Hong Kong Chinese children tested at ages 5 to 9 years. PE and PB children's mothers had lower education levels than did the other groups. With children's ages and mothers' education levels statistically controlled, the PE, PC, and PB groups were significantly lower than the C group on phonological awareness.

Holistic versus analytic processing: evidence for a different approach to processing of Chinese at the word and character levels in Chinese children.

Among 30 Hong Kong Chinese fourth graders, sensitivities to character and word constructions were examined in judgment tasks at each level. There were three conditions across both tasks: the real condition, consisting of either actual two-character compound Chinese words or real Chinese compound characters; the reversed condition, with either the order of the two morphemes in the word or the order of the semantic and phonetic radicals in the character reversed; and the random condition, with either two morphemes randomly combined to create arbitrary nonwords or a semantic radical and a phonetic radical randomly combined using correct orthographic rules to create noncharacters. On the word level, children performed worst in the reversed condition and best with real words, whereas on the character level, children performed worst in the random condition and best in the reversed condition.

The processing of morphological structure information in Chinese coordinative compounds: an event-related potential study.

The aim of this study was to investigate the morphological structure processing of Chinese compounds at short SOAs of 57ms. Event-related potentials were recorded while 16 Hong Kong Chinese university students were instructed to make visual lexical decisions in a decision-making task involving Chinese compound words. Only words in the category of the coordinative compounding structure were included in the present study.

Early oral language markers of poor reading performance in Hong Kong Chinese children.

This study investigated the extent to which language skills at ages 2 to 4 years could discriminate Hong Kong Chinese poor from adequate readers at age 7. Selected were 41 poor readers (age M = 87.6 months) and 41 adequate readers (age M = 88.