We examined whether interword spacing would facilitate acquisition of new vocabulary for second language learners of Chinese. Participants' eye movements were measured as they read new vocabulary embedded in sentences during a learning session and a test session. In the learning session, participants read sentences in traditional unspaced format and half-read sentences with interword spacing. In the test session, all participants read unspaced sentences. Participants in the spaced learning group read the target words more quickly than those in the unspaced learning group. This benefit was maintained at test, indicating that the manipulation enhanced learning of the novel words and was not a transient effect limited to occasions when interword spacing was present in the printed text. The insertion of interword spaces may allow readers to form a more fully specified representation of the novel word, or to strengthen connections between representations of the constituent characters and the multi-character word.

Native Chinese readers' eye movements were monitored as they read text that did or did not demark word boundary information. In Experiment 1, sentences had 4 types of spacing: normal unspaced text, text with spaces between words, text with spaces between characters that yielded nonwords, and finally text with spaces between every character. The authors investigated whether the introduction of spaces into unspaced Chinese text facilitates reading and whether the word or, alternatively, the character is a unit of information that is of primary importance in Chinese reading. Global and local measures indicated that sentences with unfamiliar word spaced format were as easy to read as visually familiar unspaced text. Nonword spacing and a space between every character produced longer reading times. In Experiment 2, highlighting was used to create analogous conditions: normal Chinese text, highlighting that marked words, highlighting that yielded nonwords, and highlighting that marked each character. The data from both experiments clearly indicated that words, and not individual characters, are the unit of primary importance in Chinese reading.

Word spacing is an important indicator of word boundary in most alphabetic writing system such as English, as it can not only help readers to successfully segment each word from successive character strings in text but also help readers to word acquisition and recognition. However, there is no clear word boundary information in Chinese reading, it is interesting to investigate whether it can facilitate word recognition or help readers to learn new word when providing word boundary information (i.e. word space) in Chinese reading. We reviewed the effect of word spacing on eye movement control during Chinese reading in adults, children and second language learners of Chinese. Based on the current findings reviewed in this paper, we provided some implications for constructing models of character and word recognition and eye movement control in Chinese reading, as well as prompting Chinese teaching proficiency.

We examined whether inserting spaces between words in Chinese text would help children learn to read new vocabulary. We recorded adults’ and 7- to 10-year-old children’s eye movements as they read new 2-character words, each embedded in four explanatory sentences (the learning session). Participants were divided into learning subgroups – half read word spaced sentences, and half read unspaced sentences. In the test session participants read the new words again, each in one new sentence; here, all participants read unspaced text. In the learning session, participants in the spaced group read the new words more quickly than participants in the unspaced group. Further, children in the spaced group maintained this benefit in the test session (unspaced text). In relation to three different models of Chinese lexical identification, we argue that the spacing manipulation allowed the children to form either stronger connections between the two characters’ representations and the corresponding, novel word representation, or to form a more fully specified representation of the word itself.

Word frequency is the most important variable in language research. However, despite the growing interest in the Chinese language, there are only a few sources of word frequency measures available to researchers, and the quality is less than what researchers in other languages are used to. Following recent work by New, Brysbaert, and colleagues in English, French and Dutch, we assembled a database of word and character frequencies based on a corpus of film and television subtitles (46.8 million characters, 33.5 million words). In line with what has been found in the other languages, the new word and character frequencies explain significantly more of the variance in Chinese word naming and lexical decision performance than measures based on written texts. Our results confirm that word frequencies based on subtitles are a good estimate of daily language exposure and capture much of the variance in word processing efficiency. In addition, our database is the first to include information about the contextual diversity of the words and to provide good frequency estimates for multi-character words and the different syntactic roles in which the words are used. The word frequencies are freely available for research purposes.

Abstract Developmental dyslexia (DD) is a neurobiological disorder featured by reading disabilities. In recent years, genome-wide approaches provided new perspectives to discover novel candidate genes of DD. In a previous study, rs9313548 located downstream of FGF18 showed borderline genome-wide significant association with DD. Herein, we selected rs9313548 and 11 independent tag single nucleotide polymorphisms covering gene region of FGF18 to perform association analysis with DD among 978 Chinese dyslexic cases and 998 controls recruited from elementary schools. However, we did not observe any single nucleotide polymorphism exceeding significant threshold. Our preliminary results suggested that FGF18 might not be a susceptibility gene for DD in Chinese population.

Abstract The aim of this study is to examine the developmental relationship between compounding awareness and vocabulary knowledge from grades 1 to 2 in Chinese children. In this study, 149 Chinese children were tested on compounding awareness and vocabulary knowledge from Time 1 to Time 4, with non-verbal IQ, working memory, phonological awareness, orthographical awareness, and rapid automatized naming at Time 1 as control variables. Latent growth modeling was conducted to analyze the data. Univariate models separately calculated children's initial levels and growth rates in compounding awareness and vocabulary knowledge. Bivariate model was used to examine the direction of the developmental relationships between the two variables with other cognitive and linguistic variables and the autoregression controlled. The results demonstrated that the initial level of compounding awareness predicted the growth rate of vocabulary knowledge, and the reverse relation was also found, after controlling for other cognitive and linguistic variables and the autoregression. The results suggested a reciprocal developmental relationship between children's compounding awareness and vocabulary knowledge for Chinese children, a finding that informs current models of the relationship between morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge.

180 normal children, ages five through ten years, were given a set of nine naming tests, each involving 50 timed responses to five randomly recurring pictured objects, colors, letters or numbers. “Automatization” of naming, measured by speed, accuracy, and consistency on these tasks, did not parallel the developmental order of acquisition of the various categories of names; letters and numbers were named relatively faster than were colors and objects as early as age six years. Children's facility in “automatization” of naming different semantic categories is considered in terms of the contributions of overlearning, stimulus discriminability, “operativity”, word frequency and response competition; only the last two appear to be explanatory factors.

The paper reports on a study among primary-school students of the process of deriving word meaning from written context in a first language. A sequential analysis of think-aloud protocols revealed that the students inferred one or more meanings, checked their inferences and then rejected or accepted them. These activities were performed in a highly flexible manner and their order varied. Four major sequences, which were not equally effective, showed up in a cluster analysis. The paper concludes by discussing implications for instruction and think-aloud research.

Reading fluency is commonly defined as reading accurately at a quick rate with appropriate prosody simple sounding definition. In fact, this definition hides complex processes and skills needed to produce the seemingly effortless performance of a fluent reader. Using both theory and empirical research, the presence and role of underlying processes and knowledge such as decoding fluency, processing speed, vocabulary, letter sound fluency, and sight word fluency are discussed. In doing this, we explain the elements needed for fluent reading and how they relate to each other in a multilayered fashion in young readers, and discuss the implications of this model in the development and assessment of reading fluency.

瑞文测验联合型是将瑞文的“渐进矩阵”测验的标准型及彩色型联合使用。此系一种非文字智力测验,可团体施行亦可个别施测。由于它实施简便省时,且可在语言交流不便的情况下使用,故可作为大规模智力筛查分等之用.在上海市区5—16岁儿童中抽样试用结果表明它的信度与效度都较好。本文附有上海市区的试测常模供参考。

Purpose: This study examined the contribution of metalinguistic awareness including morphological awareness, phonological awareness and orthographical awareness to reading comprehension, and the role of reading fluency as a mediator of the effects of metalinguistic awareness on reading comprehension from grades 2 to 4. Methods: Four hundred and fifteen elementary students in China mainland were administered a test battery that included measures of morphological awareness, phonological awareness, orthographical awareness, reading fluency, reading comprehension and IQ. Hierarchical regression and structural equation models (SEM) were used to analyze the data. Results: Morphological awareness uniquely explained 9%, 10% and 13% variance of reading comprehension respectively from grade 2 to grade 4, however, phonological awareness and orthographical awareness did not contribute to reading comprehension; Reading fluency partially mediated the effect of morphological awareness on reading comprehension in grades 2-4. Conclusions: These findings indicated that reading fluency and morphological awareness should be facilitated in the Chinese instruction. Morphological awareness played an important role in Chinese reading and affected reading comprehension in grades 2 to 4; Reading fluency was a significant link between morphological awareness and reading comprehension in grades 2-4.

Given that there are no spaces between words in Chinese, how words are segmented when reading is something of a mystery. Four Chinese characters, which either constituted one 4-character word or two 2-character words, were shown briefly to subjects. Subjects were quite accurate in reporting the 4-character word, but could usually only report the first 2-character word, demonstrating that word segmentation influences character recognition. The results suggest that even with these simple 4-character strings, there is an element of seriality in reading Chinese words: processing is initially focused at least to some extent on the first word. We also found that the processing of characters that are not consistent with the context is inhibited, suggesting inhibition from word representations to character representations. A simple model of Chinese word segmentation and word recognition is presented to account for the data.

Abstract Readers' eye movements were recorded to examine the role of character positional frequency on Chinese lexical acquisition during reading and its possible modulation by word spacing. In Experiment 1, three types of pseudowords were constructed based on each character's positional frequency, providing congruent, incongruent, and no positional word segmentation information. Each pseudoword was embedded into two sets of sentences, for the learning and the test phases. In the learning phase, half the participants read sentences in word-spaced format, and half in unspaced format. In the test phase, all participants read sentences in unspaced format. The results showed an inhibitory effect of character positional frequency upon the efficiency of word learning when processing incongruent pseudowords both in the learning and test phase, and also showed facilitatory effect of word spacing in the learning phase, but not at test. Most importantly, these two characteristics exerted independent influences on word segmentation. In Experiment 2, three analogous types of pseudowords were created whilst controlling for orthographic neighborhood size. The results of the two experiments were consistent, except that the effect of character positional frequency was absent in the test phase in Experiment 2. We argue that the positional frequency of a word's constituent characters may influence the character-to-word assignment in a process that likely incorporates both lexical segmentation and identification.

Children's eye movements were recorded to examine the role of word spacing and positional character frequency on the process of Chinese lexical acquisition during reading. Three types of two-character novel pseudowords were constructed: words containing characters in positions in which they frequently occurred (congruent), words containing characters in positions they do not frequently occur in (incongruent) and words containing characters that do not have a strong position bias (balanced). There were two phases within the experiment, a learning phase and a test phase. There were also two learning groups: half the children read sentences in a word-spaced format and the other half read the sentences in an unspaced format during the learning phase. All the participants read normal, unspaced text at test. A benefit of word spacing was observed in the learning phase, but not at test. Also, facilitatory effects of positional character congruency were found both in the learning and test phase; however, this benefit was greatly reduced at test. Furthermore, we did not find any interaction between word spacing and positional character frequencies, indicating that these two types of cues affect lexical acquisition independently. With respect to theoretical accounts of lexical acquisition, we argue that word spacing might facilitate the very earliest stages of word learning by clearly demarking word boundary locations. In contrast, we argue that characters' positional frequencies might affect relatively later stages of word learning.

为考察词素熟悉性是否会影响视觉词切分线索在新词学习中的作用，本研究中新词由两类假词构成第一类假词由两个高频字（高熟悉性词素）组成，第二类假词由两个低频字（低熟悉性词素）组成。实验采用学习一测试范式，将新词镶嵌在句子中供大学生被试阅读。结果发现，相比由低熟悉性词素构成的新词，词间空格在由高熟悉词素构成的新词中起到的促进作用更大。表明在汉语阅读过程中，词素熟悉性可能作为一种线索参与词切分。

从读者重复学习新词时眼动行为经历的变化,揭示儿童和成人自然阅读中新词学习能力的差异。构造双字假词作为新词,将其嵌在五个语境中,记录儿童和成人阅读时的眼动轨迹。结果发现:随着新词学习次数的递增,儿童和成人在新词上的首次注视时间呈相同变化;在对新词的凝视时间和再注视概率上,成人在第二次阅读时就大幅下降,而小学生在第四次阅读时才开始下降。表明成人新词学习能力高于儿童体现在词汇加工的相对晚期阶段。

The development of reading skills may depend to a certain extent on the development of basic visual perception. The magnocellular theory of developmental dyslexia assumes that deficits in the magnocellular pathway, indicated by less sensitivity in perceiving dynamic sensory stimuli, are responsible for a proportion of reading difficulties experienced by dyslexics. Using a task that measures coherent motion detection threshold, this study examined the relationship between dynamic visual perception and reading development in Chinese children. Experiment 1 compared the performance of 27 dyslexics and their age- and IQ-matched controls in the coherent motion detection task and in a static pattern perception task. Results showed that only in the former task did the dyslexics have a significantly higher threshold than the controls, suggesting that Chinese dyslexics, like some of their Western counterparts, may have deficits in magnocellular pathway. Experiment 2 examined whether dynamic visual processing affects specific cognitive processes in reading. One hundred fifth-grade children were tested on visual perception and reading-related tasks. Regression analyses found that the motion detection threshold accounted for 11% and 12%, respectively, variance in the speed of orthographic similarity judgment and in the accuracy of picture naming after IQ and vocabulary size were controlled. The static pattern detection threshold could not account for any variance. It is concluded that reading development in Chinese depends to a certain extent on the development of dynamic visual perception and its underlying neural pathway and that the impact of visual development can be specifically related to orthographic processing in reading Chinese.

We report two studies on rapid serial naming (RSN). Study 1 addressed the relations among RSN tasks comprising different stimuli. Separate components for RSN of alphanumeric and non-alphanumeric stimuli, as well as for tasks in which the stimuli alternated between categories were identified. In Study 2, phonological skills, processing speed, motor dexterity, and verbal fluency were found to explain RSN performance. The studies indicate: (1) that RSN tasks vary in their properties according to the stimuli used and according to the way the tasks are arranged, and (2) that RSN tasks are multi-componented.

Abstract Fluent reading depends on a complex set of cognitive processes that must work together in perfect concert. Rapid automatized naming (RAN) tasks provide insight into this system, acting as a microcosm of the processes involved in reading. In this review, we examine both RAN and reading fluency and how each has shaped our understanding of reading disabilities. We explore the research that led to our current understanding of the relationships between RAN and reading and what makes RAN unique as a cognitive measure. We explore how the automaticity that supports RAN affects reading across development, reading abilities, and languages, and the biological bases of these processes. Finally, we bring these converging areas of knowledge together by examining what the collective studies of RAN and reading fluency contribute to our goals of creating optimal assessments and interventions that help every child become a fluent, comprehending reader.

This study investigates the eye movements of dyslexic children and their age-matched controls when reading Chinese. Dyslexic children exhibited more and longer fixations than age-matched control children, and an increase of word length resulted in a greater increase in the number of fixations and gaze durations for the dyslexic than for the control readers. The report focuses on the finding that there was a significant difference between the two groups in the fixation landing position as a function of word length in single-fixation cases, while there was no such difference in the initial fixation of multi-fixation cases. We also found that both groups had longer incoming saccade amplitudes while the launch sites were closer to the word in single fixation cases than in multi-fixation cases. Our results suggest that dyslexic children inefficient lexical processing, in combination with the absence of orthographic word boundaries in Chinese, leads them to select saccade targets at the beginning of words conservatively. These findings provide further evidence for parafoveal word segmentation during reading of Chinese sentences.

The effect of increasing the space between the letters in words on eye movements during reading was investigated under various word-spacing conditions. Participants read sentences that included a high- or low-frequency target word, letters were displayed normally or with an additional space between adjacent letters, and one, two, or three spaces were present between each word. The spacing manipulations were found to modulate the effect of word frequency on the number and duration of fixations on target words, indicating, more specifically, that letter spacing affected actual word identification under various word-spacing conditions. In addition, whereas initial fixations landed at the preferred viewing position (i.e., to the left of a word center) for sentences presented normally, landing positions were nearer the beginnings of words when letter spacing was increased, and even nearer the beginnings of words when word boundary information was lacking. Findings are discussed in terms of the influence of textual spacing on eye movement control.

Reading a text without spaces in an alphabetic language causes disruption at the levels of word identification and eye movement control. In the present experiment, we examined how word discriminability affects the pattern of eye movements when reading unspaced text in an alphabetic language. More specifically, we designed an experiment in which participants read three types of sentences: normally written sentences, regular unspaced sentences, and alternatingbold unspaced sentences. Although there was a reading cost in the unspaced sentences relative to the normally written sentences, this cost was much smaller in alternatingbold unspaced sentences than in regular unspaced sentences.

Recent research has demonstrated that slight increases of inter-letter spacing have a positive impact on skilled readers' recognition of visually presented words. In the present study, we examined whether this effect generalises to young normal readers and readers with developmental dyslexia, and whether increased inter-letter spacing affects the reading times and comprehension of a short text. To that end, we conducted a series of lexical decision and continuous reading experiments in which words were presented with the default settings or with a small increase in inter-letter spacing. Increased spacing produced shorter word identification times not only with adult skilled readers (Experiment 1), but also with young normal readers (Grade 2 and Grade 4 children; Experiment 2) and, even to a larger degree, with readers with dyslexia (Experiments 3 and 4). These experiments suggest that slight increases in inter-letter spacing would improve the readability of texts aimed at children, especially those with dyslexia.

The study examines the relationship between second language (L2) passage comprehension and intake (form recognition), gain (meaning recognition and production), and retention of new lexical items from the passages. The effect of topic familiarity on the above relationships is also examined. Participants were a cross‐sectional sample of L2 learners. All participants read more and less familiar script‐based narratives containing nonsense words. After reading they performed a free‐written recall in their first language. Two days after reading, an intake and 2 gain measures were administered. Twenty‐eight days after reading, the 2 gain measures were repeated. Analyses reveal a generally robust consistent role of passage comprehension in lexical gain and retention, but differential patterns of relationships in intake due to effects of topic familiarity.

Abstract Subjects read either normal text, text in which the space information between words was absent (either spaces were removed filled with x), or text in which spaces were preserved but the words were flanked by x. In two experiments, reading rate decreased by approx. 50% when space information was not available, suggesting that reading unspaced text is relatively difficult. The removal of space information increased the effect of word frequency on the fixation times for selected target words, indicating that word identification was interfered with by the lack of spaces. In addition, removal of space information influenced the initial landing positions on words, indicating that eye movement control was affected by the absence of spaces. Further analyses were conducted that explored the relationship between these two effects.

Compared to skilled adult readers, children typically make more fixations that are longer in duration, shorter saccades, and more regressions, thus reading more slowly (Blythe & Joseph, 2011). Recent attempts to understand the reasons for these differences have discovered some similarities (e.g., children and adults target their saccades similarly; Joseph, Liversedge, Blythe, White, & Rayner, 2009) and some differences (e.g., children fixation durations are more affected by lexical variables; Blythe, Liversedge, Joseph, White, & Rayner, 2009) that have yet to be explained. In this article, the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control in reading (Reichle, 2011; Reichle, Pollatsek, Fisher, & Rayner, 1998) is used to simulate various eye-movement phenomena in adults vs. children in order to evaluate hypotheses about the concurrent development of reading skill and eye-movement behavior. These simulations suggest that the primary difference between children and adults is their rate of lexical processing, and that different rates of (post-lexical) language processing may also contribute to some phenomena (e.g., children slower detection of semantic anomalies; Joseph et al., 2008). The theoretical implications of this hypothesis are discussed, including possible alternative accounts of these developmental changes, how reading skill and eye movements change across the entire lifespan (e.g., college-aged vs. older readers), and individual differences in reading ability.

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0042698907002556

The effect of spacing in relation to word was examined for four groups of non-native Chinese speakers (American, Korean, Japanese, and Thai) who were Chinese as second language. Chinese sentences with four types of spacing information were used: unspaced text, word-spaced text, character-spaced text, and nonword-spaced text. Also, participants' native languages were different in terms of their basic characteristics: English and Korean are spaced, whereas the other two are unspaced; Japanese is character based whereas the other three are alphabetic. Thus, we assessed whether any spacing effects were modulated by native language characteristics. Eye movement measures showed least disruption to reading for word-spaced text and longer reading times for unspaced than character-spaced text, with nonword-spaced text yielding the most disruption. These effects were uninfluenced by native language (though reading times differed between groups as a result of Chinese reading experience). Demarcation of word boundaries through spacing reduces non-native readers' uncertainty about the characters that constitute a word, thereby speeding lexical identification, and in turn, reading. More generally, the results indicate that words have psychological reality for those who are to read Chinese as a second language, and that of text into words is more beneficial to successful comprehension than is separating individual Chinese characters with spaces.

Tasks representing 9 cognitive constructs of potential importance to understanding Chinese reading development and impairment were administered to 75 children with dyslexia and 77 age-matched children without reading difficulties in 5th and 6th grade. Logistic regression analyses revealed that dyslexic readers were best distinguished from age-matched controls with tasks of morphological awareness, speeded number naming, and vocabulary skill; performance on tasks of visual skills or phonological awareness failed to distinguish the groups. Path analyses further revealed that a construct of morphological awareness was the strongest consistent predictor of a variety of literacy-related skills across both groups. Findings suggest that morphological awareness may be a core theoretical construct necessary for explaining variability in reading Chinese.

This study investigated subtypes of developmental dyslexia in Chinese by assessing three cases of Chinese dyslexic children. A battery of screening measures, a character naming and meaning task, and metalinguistic awareness tasks were administered to each child. One of the three children demonstrated characteristics of developmental surface dyslexia, and the other two showed characteristics of developmental deep dyslexia. Moreover, the children's reading problems were found to be specifically related to their deficits in metalinguistic awareness. The dissociation between developmental surface and deep dyslexia provides support to Weekes et al .'s ( Neurocase 1997; 3 : 51-60) model that a semantic and a nonsemantic pathway exist independently in Chinese reading. The results also suggest that deficits in morphological and phonological awareness may cause developmental delays in the semantic and the nonsemantic pathway. Copyright 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0749596X09000722

Re-examines the role of naming-speed deficits in developmental reading disabilities. Presentation of cross-sectional, longitudinal, and cross-linguistic research; Exploration of two nonconsecutive hypotheses on putative links between naming speed and reading processes; Demonstration of naming speed differences among dyslexic readers.

本文从被试取样以及测试任务、筛选标准差异、信度和效度以及理论的适用性等方面详细综述了阅读障碍亚类型研究的现状,提出阅读障碍亚类型研究结果的可推论性受到质疑不仅是由于理论视角的差异,也是实验操作的问题,为未来阅读障碍亚类型的深入研究提供借鉴.

Saccade and fixation are the elementary ocularmotor activities during reading. The eye-movement measures in reading research can be classified into two different categories. One category is temporal dimension measure related to the time course of eye movements and it includes the measures in area of interest of character or word (such as single fixation duration, first fixation duration, second fixation duration, gaze duration, regression time and total fixation duration and so on.) and the measures in area of interest of phrase or sentence (such as first-pass reading time, forward reading time, second-pass reading time, regression path reading time, re-reading time and so on.). The other category is spatial dimension measure related to the location of eye movement and it includes saccade amplitude, landing position, number of fixations, skipping rate, refixation rate and regression count. Finally, when using the eye movement measures we should pay attention to the classification of oculomotor measures, the cutoff criterion of raw data, the psychological interpretation of the measures and so on.

Dyslexic children are known to be slower than normal readers in rapid automatized naming (RAN). This suggests that dyslexics encounter local processing difficulties, which presumably induce a narrower perceptual span. Consequently, dyslexics should suffer less than normal readers from removing parafoveal preview. Here we used a gaze-contingent moving window paradigm in a RAN task to experimentally test this prediction. Results indicate that dyslexics extract less parafoveal information than control children. We propose that more attentional resources are recruited to the foveal processing because of dyslexics less automatized translation of visual symbols into phonological output, thereby causing a reduction of the perceptual span. This in turn leads to less efficient preactivation of parafoveal information and, hence, more difficulty in processing the next foveal item.

Perceptual learning refers to the improvement of perceptual performance as a function of training. Recent studies found that auditory perceptual learning may improve phonological skills in individuals with developmental dyslexia in alphabetic writing system. However, whether auditory perceptual learning could also benefit the reading skills of those learning the Chinese logographic writing system is, as yet, unknown. The current study aimed to investigate the remediation effect of auditory temporal perceptual learning on Mandarin-speaking school children with developmental dyslexia. Thirty children with dyslexia were screened from a large pool of students in 3th-5th grades. They completed a series of pretests and then were assigned to either a non-training control group or a training group. The training group worked on a pure tone duration discrimination task for 7 sessions over 2 weeks with thirty minutes per session. Post-tests immediately after training and a follow-up test 2 months later were conducted. Analyses revealed a significant training effect in the training group relative to non-training group, as well as near transfer to the temporal interval discrimination task and far transfer to phonological awareness, character recognition and reading fluency. Importantly, the training effect and all the transfer effects were stable at the 2-month follow-up session. Further analyses found that a significant correlation between character recognition performance and learning rate mainly existed in the slow learning phase, the consolidation stage of perceptual learning, and this effect was modulated by an individuals' executive function. These findings indicate that adaptive auditory temporal perceptual learning can lead to learning and transfer effects on reading performance, and shed further light on the potential role of basic perceptual learning in the remediation and prevention of developmental dyslexia.

本研究对八个班的二年级汉语儿童进行了长达一年的追踪,深入探索了朗读流畅性在儿童阅读发展中的作用。结果发现,篇章朗读流畅性与学生的多项言语和阅读能力正相关;在控制了年龄、瑞文推理、汉字识别和口语词汇量之后,只在三年级时发现了篇章朗读流畅性对同时期的阅读理解有独特解释作用,但未能在二年级时找到类似的横断证据;但在排除了自回归效应和其他变量的作用之后,二年级时的朗读流畅性对一年后的阅读理解具有独特的预测作用。这表明朗读流畅性在汉语儿童阅读能力发展中具有重要预测作用,今后的理论研究和教学实践都应对此给予足够重视。

This 2-year longitudinal study sought to identify a developmental pattern of Chinese and English reading skills in children with and without dyslexia from 6 to 8years of age. Three groups of 15 children each hose with dyslexia, age-matched (AM) controls, and reading-matched (RM) controls articipated. Dyslexia was diagnosed at 8years of age. All children were tested on phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), morphological awareness, word reading, and vocabulary knowledge in both Chinese and English and also speed of processing skill. AM controls outperformed the group with dyslexia on all measures except for phonological awareness, English word reading, and vocabulary. However, those with dyslexia and AM controls developed at a similar rate across all reading-related skills from 6 to 8years of age. Compared with the RM controls, the group with dyslexia scored higher in phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and vocabulary knowledge in both Chinese and English and also in English word reading but scored similarly in RAN. Children with dyslexia, thus, manifested clear difficulties in Chinese vocabulary knowledge, morphological awareness, and RAN as well as general speed of processing, representing a developmental lag in cognitive skills. Among these, RAN deficits are likely to be the most severe deficits in Chinese children with dyslexia.

Although the causes of dyslexia are still debated, all researchers agree that the main challenge is to find ways that allow a child with dyslexia to read more words in less time, because reading more is undisputedry the most efficient intervention for dyslexia. Sophisticated training programs exist but they typically target the component skills of reading, such as phonological awareness. After the component skills have improved, the main challenge remains (that is, reading deficits must be treated by reading more vicious circle for a dyslexic child). Here, we show that a simple manipulation of letter spacing substantially improved text reading performance on the fry (without any training) in a large, unselected sample of Italian and French dyslexic children. Extra-large letter spacing helps reading, because dyslexies are abnormally affected by crowding, a perceptual phenomenon with detrimental effects on letter recognition that is modulated by the spacing between letters. Extra-large letter spacing may help to break the vicious circle by rendering the reading material more easily accessible.