Unspoken knowledge: kindergarteners are sensitive to patterns in Chinese pinyin before formally learning it

ABSTRACT

Do young children extract patterns from print to which they are naturally exposed but only in a limited way? This study investigated Chinese kindergarteners’ sensitivity to regularities in pinyin, an alphabetic coding system for non-alphabetic Chinese characters to which kindergarteners have limited exposure and little motivation for learning. Sixty 4-and 5-year-olds from Beijing took a pinyin decision task and a pinyin learning task and were assessed on Chinese word reading, Chinese word writing, and non-verbal IQ. Sensitivity to letter patterns in pinyin spellings and sensitivity to letter-sound correspondences in pinyin syllables appeared in 5-year-olds. After statistically controlling for age and IQ, sensitivity to letter-sound correspondences in pinyin syllables explained 4% additional variance in Chinese word reading and 7% additional variance in Chinese word writing. This study contributes novel evidence to statistical learning in early literacy, demonstrating that children are adept at pattern recognition in print even under limited conditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Statistical learning
• early literacy
• kindergartener
• Chinese
• pinyin

Acknowledgements

We thank all participating children, teachers, and parents.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China Grant [grant number 81371497].