An Investigation of the Bidirectional Relations of Word Reading to Timed Visual Tasks Involving Different Levels of Phonological Processing in Chinese

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the association of timed visual processing tasks varying in levels of phonological processing with word reading. We tested 293 Chinese children on Cross Out, Visual Matching, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and Chinese character recognition across three to five years. Children’s character recognition at ages 6 and 7 predicted Cross Out at ages 7 and 8. There was a cross-lagged relationship between character recognition and Visual Matching from ages 6 to 7. However, only character recognition at age 7 predicted Visual Matching at age 8. While RAN and character recognition predicted each other from ages 5 to 6. But only RAN predicted subsequent character recognition from age 6 to age 9. Results suggest that learning to read Chinese promotes visual processing when a phonological component is not required in such processing, but conversion from visual codes to phonological codes predicts reading in Chinese.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Key Basic Research Program of China (2014CB846103), by National Natural Science Foundation of China (31671126, 31611130107), by Beijing Municipal Science & Technology Commission (Z151100003915122), by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2017XTCX04) to H. Shu, and partly by the Hong Kong Collaborative Research Fund (CUHK8/CRF/13G) to given to C. McBride (PC) and colleagues. The research leading to these results has received partial funding from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under REA grant agreement n [609400]. Author Note: Jinger Pan and Xin Cui contributed equally to this work.