Development of Orthographic Awareness, Morphological Awareness and Rapid Automatized Naming of Elementary-level Students in China： A Longitudinal Analysis from Grades 1 to 4

The longitudinal study sought to examine the dynamic development of cognitive skills for reading among elementary-level students in China's Mainland. Two groups of students in first （n=164, mean age=6.65 years at first test） and second grade （n=202, mean age=7.73 years at first test） were followed on orthographic awareness, morphological awareness and rapid automatized naming （RAN） for two years. The children exhibited significant improvement in orthographic awareness, morphological awareness and RAN from grades 1 to 4. More importantly, to the orthographic and morphological awareness, while the children took a leap from grade 1 to 2 and grade 3 to 4, the progress developed at relatively slow rates from grade 2 to 3. In order to assure children＇s development of orthographic and morphological awareness, evidence-based orthographically and morphologically enhanced instruction is needed for Chinese children in the early elementary years, especially for those at the stage from grade 2 to 3.

Orthographic Processing of Developmental Dyslexic Children in China: Evidence from an Event-Related Potential Study

Objective:This study aimed to explore the orthographic processing of simplified Chinese characters in developmental dyslexic children in Kashgar,Xinjiang,China,and provide a theoretical basis for intervention strategies for developmental dyslexia in Chinese.Methods:Using event-related potential(ERP)measures,18 developmental dyslexic children and 23 typically developing children performed a character decision task with three types of stimuli:real characters(RCs),pseudocharacters(PCs),and noncharacters(NCs).Results:Behavioral results showed that the control children displayed a faster and higher accurate performance than the dyslexic children across PCs and NCs.ERP data revealed that the RCs and PCs elicited a stronger P200 than the NCs.Compared with the RCs and NCs,children in the control group showed more N400 negatives for PCs.It is worth mentioning that dyslexic children did not show any difference on N400,which reflected the insufficient orthographic processing of dyslexic children in China.Conclusion:These results show that Chinese dyslexic children had orthographic processing defects.