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HKU New Study Examines Chinese Children's Reading Ability and Offers Key to Remediating Dyslexia (Press Release)

07 Jun 2005

For the first time, researchers from the University of Hong Kong (HKU) have shown that the ability to read Chinese is associated with a child's writing skills. This challenges the prominent theory of reading development assuming that reading ability build on spoken language and, thus, the child's awareness of speech sound structure plays a pivotal role.

The work "Reading depends on writing, in Chinese" by Dr. Siok Wai-Ting, HKU's assistant research professor of linguistics, and her colleagues in HKU was published on June 6, 2005 in the Proceedings of National Academy of Science of the United States of America (PNAS), one of the prestigious multidisciplinary scientific journals.

Language development entails four fundamental and interactive abilities: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Over the past four decades, a great deal of research with English and other alphabets has indicated that reading acquisition is strongly related to a child's listening skills, particularly the child's sensitivity to sound units of spoken language. In recent years, it has been hypothesized that the close relationship between reading and listening is manifested universally across languages and that behavioral remediation using strategies addressing sound awareness alleviates reading difficulties in dyslexics.

Siok and colleagues administered a variety of reading, writing by copying, picture drawing, and sound awareness tests to 131 Beijing schoolchildren aged 7-10. In the writing task, children were asked to copy samples of Chinese characters. Similarly, the picture drawing task required children to copy simple objects. They found that writing skills heavily contributed to reading ability, whereas the contribution of sound awareness was minor. Picture drawing skills were also associated with Chinese children's reading.

According to the study, writing contributed to reading by two mechanisms; children used both visual analysis of a written character's structure and long-term motor memories developed by repeatedly writing the characters when learning to read. "These visual-motor skills developed from copying facilitate and predict Chinese reading", said Dr. Siok.

These results demonstrate that two distinct pathways exist in reading acquisition: learning to read Chinese by hand, and learning to read English by ear. This provides support for a focus on certain types of behavioral measures including sensory-motor skills as anchor points in the development of instruments for screening Chinese children who may have reading difficulties.

"The findings offer the key to developing effective strategies to learn Chinese and remediate Chinese dyslexia", explained Dr. Tan Li-Hai, lead author of the study and associate professor of the Department of Linguistics of HKU.

Last September, this group of researchers found that different brain areas are responsible for reading disorders in Chinese and English, contradicting the widely held view that dyslexia has a universal neurological origin. This new study has generated important findings implicating that remediation strategies for dyslexia vary by culture.

Spoken Chinese is highly homophonic - many characters share the same syllables -, and written characters are based on meaning rather than sound. This linguistic feature of the Chinese language led the HKU researchers to challenge the universal and preeminent status of phonological awareness in explanations of reading development.

"It is true that a Chinese child has already acquired spoken language before learning to read. Relying on sound awareness, however, is far from sufficient for successful Chinese reading", added Dr. Siok.

The finding that children's picture drawing performance was highly predictive of their Chinese reading performance lends behavioral support to the linguistic theory of the homology of Chinese writing and painting. The earliest Chinese graphs generally acknowledged to be true writing are found on shells and bones that date back some 3400 years.

In a globalized world, teaching and learning the Chinese language is one of the major endeavors of many institutions in the Western countries. "Our study suggests that it is not suitable to adopt the learning methods of native language in order to learn second language", remarked Professor John Spinks, co-author of the study and professor of biopsychology of HKU.

The research was coauthored by colleagues at Georgetown University Medical Center and the University of Pittsburgh. It was supported by a HKSAR Government Central Allocation Grant disbursed by the Research Grants Council of the University Grants Committee of Hong Kong and by funding from the University of Hong Kong and the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

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Article Title: "Reading depends on writing, in Chinese" by Li Hai Tan, John A. Spinks, Guinevere F. Eden, Charles A. Perfetti, and Wai Ting Siok

Media Contact:
Dr Siok Wai-Ting, Department of Linguistics, HKU, tel: 2241-5890; fax: 852-2549-6253; e-mail: siok@hku.hk
Dr Tan Li-Hai, Department of Linguistics, HKU, tel: 2241-5310; fax: 852-2549-6253; e-mail: tan@hku.hk