Purpose
In the study of dyslexia, many empirical studies have pointed out that phonological awareness and rapid naming tasks are the most effective in distinguishing good readers from weak readers, so they are widely used in the early screening of children with suspected learning disabilities. In view of this, this study lists phonological awareness and naming speed ability as the main basic literacy cognitive variables, and further explores the influence of phonological awareness and rapid naming on literacy ability. In the 1980s, Sparks, Ganschow and others began to conduct a series of studies on foreign language learning difficulties, and later they proposed the “Linguistic Coding Differences Hypothesis” (LCDH) to explain the problem of foreign language learning difficulties. They believe that when a learner has difficulty in learning a foreign language, it is because the language processing ability of the learner’s mother tongue is inherently problematic. Reading and writing ability of the mother tongue is the prerequisite ability for learning a foreign language, especially those skills involving symbol decoding and phonological processing. Chinese and English are two different writing systems. While English is alphabetic writing system, Chinese is logographic writing system. Does LCDH still work for Chinese-speaking Taiwanese children with dyslexia when they learn English? Or the difference in writing systems will not pose as an obstacle, and students with Chinese literacy disabilities can also learn English well? What key problems do students with Chinese literacy disabilities encounter in learning English? Does it stem from the pre-existing difficulties of the mother tongue itself? Is there a commonality between the native language and the foreign language? If the relationship between the two languages can be further clarified, then findings can provide suggestions for teachers to conduct remedial instruction and help students who are not good at learning their mother tongue. This study was aimed to test the LCDH. We examined the relations between reading-related cognitive skills (i.e., phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming) and word reading of Chinese children with dyslexia in their Chinese language (L1) and in English (L2).
Methods
A total of 90 children [30 with dyslexia (Ds), 30 chronological age (CA) controls, and 30 reading-level (RL) controls] participated in this study. The three groups were matched by IQ and SES. All children were administered measures of Chinese character list, English word reading, and rapid naming as well as phonological awareness tasks in both L1 and L2. Chinese phonological awareness tasks included initial sound detection, rime detection, and tone awareness. English phonological awareness tasks included initial sound deletion and sound sorting. Chinese rapid naming task was 5 Zhu-In-Fu-Hao symbols randomly presented 10 times. English rapid naming task was 5 alphabets randomly presented 10 times. Children were asked to name them as fast as possible. RL group refers to the control group whose chronological age is lower than the experimental group but has the same reading ability. It is assumed that the dyslexia group performs lower than the same chronological age control group in a certain cognitive ability, and is also worse than the same reading ability group. Then the researchers can speculate that the cognitive ability is not likely to be different due to the influence of reading ability, but may be the cause of the difference in reading performance. Therefore, participants of this study included the literacy disorder group in the upper grades of elementary school, the same chronological age group and the middle grade group with the same literacy ability, so as to clarify whether the basic cognitive ability of Chinese and English literacy is the key factor affecting English literacy. Three research questions were: (1) What were the differences of L1 and L2 phonological awareness performance in Ds, CA, and RL groups? (2) What were the differences of L1 and L2 rapid automatized naming performance in Ds, CA, and RL groups? (3) What were the predictive power of L1 and L2 phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming to the three groups learning English words?
Results
The major findings of this study were as follows: (1) Ds performed significantly lower than CA in all reading-related cognitive skills in Chinese. However, Ds also performed significantly lower than RL in rapid naming. To sum up, Chinese rapid naming may be the cause of Chinese character reading disability. (2) Ds performed significantly lower than CA in all reading-related cognitive skills in English. However, Ds also performed significantly lower than RL in rapid naming. To sum up, English rapid naming may be the cause of Chinese character reading disability. (3) There were significant correlations among phonological awareness (deletion), rapid naming and character reading in English; Chinese was not significantly correlated with English. Deletion and rapid naming were the best predictors of English character reading.
Conclusions
Children with dyslexia showed weaker performance than CA controls in both languages and had more difficulties in rapid naming than RL controls. Rapid naming rather than phonological awareness may be the cause of Chinese character reading disability. Reading-related cognitive skills in Chinese did not contribute significantly to the ability to read English words, suggesting little cross-linguistic transfer from L1 to L2. This result did not fully support the linguistic coding differences hypothesis. According to the findings, recommendations of this study for further studies and practical implementation included: (1) Rapid naming was critical to L1 and L2 word reading performance. It could be a powerful detective index in early diagnosing children with dyslexia. (2) Phonological awareness and rapid naming were important to English word learning. Teachers can spend more time in teaching phonological awareness and rapid naming when children with dyslexia start to learn English. (3) Children in middle grade have shown big differences in English word reading task (from 0 to full scores). Teachers should pay attention to these children with low English reading performance and provide remedial instruction as early as possible. (4) LCDH was not fully supported in this study. In the future, different groups can be involved, such as participants with various language learning experiences or education levels, to explore the possibilities of LCDH in different conditions.
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