Spelling in developmental dyslexia in Chinese: Evidence of deficits in statistical learning and over-reliance on phonology

ABSTRACT

This study employed a multi-dimensional (i.e., orthographic, phonological, and semantic) and bi-level (i.e., character and radical) approach to analyze the character writing of 120 Hong Kong Chinese children with developmental dyslexia in Grades 2–5 and 120 typically developing age-matched controls. Relative to their typically developing peers, children with dyslexia were less sensitive to the positional and functional consistencies of sublexical radicals and exhibited prolonged use of phonology at the character level as grade-level advanced. Furthermore, the children with dyslexia relatively relied more on phonology at the radical level than younger, reading level-matched children. These results indicate the effects of implicit statistical learning on the development of Chinese character writing skills and suggest that the prolonged use and overreliance on phonology in character writing by Chinese children with dyslexia may reflect their difficulties in implicit statistical learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Spelling
• character writing error analysis
• implicit statistical learning
• dyslexia
• dysgraphia

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by funding from the General Research Fund (17609518, 2018-2020), from the Hong Kong Government Research Council to Xiuli Tong. We are grateful to the children and their parents who participated in our study. We thank Ming Yuet Wong, Ning Fung Wong, Ha Wing Yu, and other student helpers for their assistance in data encoding and the Speech, Language, and Reading Lab members for their support for the completion of this project. Additionally, we would like to thank John Martino, Yuk Ying Chan, Yanmengna Cui, Sin Hang Law, and other lab members for their English editing and proofreading and the Editor Brenda Rapp and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A phonetic transcription system that assists in learning the pronunciation of Chinese characters in Mainland China.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by funding from the General Research Fund [17609518, 2018–2020], from the Hong Kong Government Research Council to Xiuli Tong.