A three-year longitudinal study of reading and spelling difficulty in Chinese developmental dyslexia: The matter of morphological awareness

Xiuhong TONG, Catherine MCBRIDE, Chor Ming Jason LO, Hua SHU

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlespeer-review

30 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

In the present study, we used a three-time point longitudinal design to investigate the associations of morphological awareness to word reading and spelling in a small group of those with and without dyslexia taken from a larger sample of 164 Hong Kong Chinese children who remained in a longitudinal study across ages 6, 7 and 8. Among those 164 children, 15 had been diagnosed as having dyslexia by professional psychologists, and 15 other children manifested average reading ability and had been randomly selected from the sample for comparison. All children were administered a battery of tasks including Chinese character recognition, word dictation, morphological awareness, phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming. Multivariate analysis of variance and predictive discriminate analysis were performed to examine whether the dyslexic children showed differences in the cognitive-linguistic tasks in comparison with controls. Results suggested that the dyslexic groups had poorer performance in morphological awareness and RAN across all 3 years. However, phonological awareness was not stable in distinguishing the groups. Findings suggest that morphological awareness is a relatively strong correlate of spelling difficulties in Chinese, but phonological awareness is not. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)372-386
JournalDyslexia
Volume23
Issue number4
Early online dateJul 2017
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2017

Citation

Tong, X., McBride, C., Lo, J. C. M., & Shu, H. (2017). A three-year longitudinal study of reading and spelling difficulty in Chinese developmental dyslexia: The matter of morphological awareness. Dyslexia, 23(4), 372-386.

Keywords

  • Morphological awareness
  • Reading and spelling
  • Dyslexia
  • Chinese language

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'A three-year longitudinal study of reading and spelling difficulty in Chinese developmental dyslexia: The matter of morphological awareness'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.