Developmental trajectory of Chinese character reading among Hong Kong Chinese kindergartners

In this longitudinal study, we assessed 88 Hong Kong Chinese kindergarteners' Chinese character reading four times with 6-month intervals over 1.5 years with the first testing point in the fall of the second year of kindergarten (K2), during which morphological awareness, phonological awareness, orthographic awareness, visual-spatial relationships, and nonverbal IQ were tested (Time 1). The growth modeling analysis showed that reading development of kindergarteners follows a cumulative trajectory, suggesting that children with higher initial reading ability develop reading ability at a faster rate. Additionally, morphological awareness at K2 positively and significantly predicted the growth rate of reading ability (i.e., reading potential) between K2 and K3 over 1.5 years, a period in which formal teaching and learning Chinese takes place in Hong Kong. These findings demonstrate a strong connection between early morphological awareness and reading growth, expanding our understanding of reading development beyond the static level. Copyright © 2016 Twenty-Third Annual Meeting of Society for the Scientific Study of Reading.