Cross-Linguistic Word Recognition Development Among Chinese Children: A Multilevel Linear Mixed-Effects Modeling Approach

Connie Qun Guan; Scott H Fraundorf

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00544

Cross-Linguistic Word Recognition Development Among Chinese Children: A Multilevel Linear Mixed-Effects Modeling Approach

Front Psychol. 2020 Apr 16:11:544. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00544. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Connie Qun Guan^{1

2

3}, Scott H Fraundorf⁴

Affiliations

¹ Faculty of Foreign Studies, Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing, China.
² Center for the Advances of Language Sciences, University of Science and Technology, Beijing, China.
³ Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, United States.
⁴ Department of Psychology and Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, United States.

Abstract

The effects of psycholinguistic variables on reading development are critical to the evaluation of theories about the reading system. Although we know that the development of reading depends on both individual differences (endogenous) and item-level effects (exogenous), developmental research has focused mostly on average-level performance, ignoring individual differences. We investigated how the development of word recognition in Chinese children in both Chinese and English is affected by (a) item-level, exogenous effects (word frequency, radical consistency, and curricular grade level); (b) subject-level, endogenous individual differences (orthographic awareness and phonological awareness); and (c) their interactive effect. We tested native Chinese (Putonghua)-speaking children (n = 763) in grades 1 to 6 with both Chinese character and English word identification (lexical) decision tasks. Our findings show that (a) there were effects of both word frequency and age of acquisition in both Chinese and English, but these item-level effects generally weakened with increasing age; (b) individual differences in phonological and orthographic awareness each contributed to successful performance; and (c) in Chinese, item-level effects were weaker for more proficient readers. We contend that our findings can be explained by theoretical models that incorporate cumulative learning as the basis for development of item-level effects in the reading system.

Keywords: AoA; Chinese-English bilingual children; frequency; grapheme recognition development; multilevel linear mixed models; orthographic awareness.