Modeling the relationships between language skills and sentence comprehension among Chinese junior elementary graders

Research output: Contribution to conferencePapers

Abstract

The present study examined the contributions of vocabulary knowledge, syntactic skills, and oral narrative skills to sentence reading comprehension among Chinese junior elementary school children. Various language and reading measures were administered to 85 Chinese normally-achieving children from Grade 2 to Grade 3 in Hong Kong. Results showed that vocabulary knowledge and oral narrative skills contributed significantly to word order skills, an important syntactic skill in Chinese. Vocabulary knowledge contributed to word recognition directly and contributed to sentence comprehension indirectly through word recognition and syntactic skills; and syntactic skills contributed to sentence comprehension directly. These findings suggest that while vocabulary knowledge is important for Chinese word reading, syntactic word order plays a central role in Chinese sentence comprehension. Copyright © 2014 IGEL.
Original languageEnglish
Publication statusPublished - Jul 2014
EventThe 14th Conference of the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media - Turin, Italy
Duration: 21 Jul 201425 Jul 2014

Conference

ConferenceThe 14th Conference of the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityTurin
Period21/07/1425/07/14

Citation

Xiao, X.-Y. (2014, July). Modeling the relationships between language skills and sentence comprehension among Chinese junior elementary graders. Paper presented at the 14th Conference of the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature and Media, Turin, Italy.

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Modeling the relationships between language skills and sentence comprehension among Chinese junior elementary graders'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.