Performance in a Visual Search Task Uniquely Predicts Reading Abilities in Third-Grade Hong Kong Chinese Children

Abstract

This study examined the relation between the performance in a visual search task and reading ability in 92 third-grade Hong Kong Chinese children. The visual search task, which is considered a measure of visual-spatial attention, accounted for unique variance in Chinese character reading after controlling for age, nonverbal intelligence, vocabulary knowledge, morphological awareness, phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, and rapid automatized naming. Visual search skill also explained unique variance in reading comprehension after further controlling for Chinese character reading. The findings of the present study underscore the importance of visual-spatial attention for Chinese reading, at both the character and text levels.

Notes

¹ In Chinese-speaking societies, traditional characters are used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, whereas simplified characters are used in Mainland China and Singapore.

² We used the rank of a character in the database as its frequency in this calculation. The most frequent character had the frequency of 1, and least frequent character had the frequency of 3,000.

³ Because some participants did not make any errors, to maintain the original difference in reaction time, 1 was added to the number of errors made by all participants.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the General Research Fund of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Research Grants Council (HKIED: GRF/ECS 858113) and the Internal Research Grant (IRG R3318) of the Hong Kong Institute of Education in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.