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The present study examined the mediating effect of processing speed on the relationship between state anxiety and reading comprehension in Chinese children with and without reading disabilities (RD). A total of 53 Chinese children with RD and 66 typically developing children were administered cognitive and noncognitive measures. We found that the two groups had distinct patterns of state anxiety and processing speed. A significant indirect effect of state anxiety on reading comprehension through processing speed was found only in children with RD. Our findings contribute to filling a research gap and provide evidence to front-line practitioners for adapting the teaching and measures for Chinese children with RD.

Background: Research has shown that paired associate learning (PAL) plays an important role in children's word reading across different languages. However, little is known about the construct of PAL and its relationship with word reading in Chinese children. Methods: A total of 204 second-year kindergarten children from Mainland China were assessed on measures of PAL, including the four mapping conditions of PAL -- visual-verbal, verbal-verbal, visual-visual and verbal-visual PAL. Tasks of working memory (WM), inhibitory control, visual-motor integration (VMI), phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge and Chinese word reading were also administered to these children. Results: Our results showed that WM, VMI and phonological awareness were unique predictors of PAL, whereas inhibitory control and orthographic knowledge were not. Furthermore, PAL showed an independent contribution to Chinese word reading after controlling for phonological awareness and orthographic knowledge. The mediation analysis showed that PAL was a significant mediator of the association between different cognitive-linguistic skills and Chinese word reading. Conclusion: Paired associate learning contributes to Chinese word reading over and above phonological awareness and orthographic knowledge. Findings underscore the potential importance of PAL, as distinct from other cognitive-linguistic skills, for understanding variability in early reading development.

The relationships among visual and auditory temporal processing, rapid naming, and oral reading fluency in Chinese children with and without dyslexia were examined. Primary school-aged Chinese children with dyslexia (N = 47) and chronological-age-matched controls (N = 47) were recruited. Temporal processing, rapid naming, oral reading fluency, Chinese character reading, and nonverbal IQ were assessed. There were significant correlations among visual and auditory temporal processing, rapid naming, and oral reading fluency. The patterns of the relationships among these measures differed between the children with and without dyslexia. The path analyses revealed that visual temporal processing had significant direct and indirect effects (through rapid naming) on oral reading fluency; only the children with dyslexia showed a significant direct effect of auditory temporal processing. These findings have research and educational implications for enhancing the reading abilities of Chinese children with dyslexia.

Background: There is emerging evidence that individuals with developmental dyslexia show deficits in visual-spatial attention. This study focused on visual searches and examined whether visual search deficits would be found in Chinese children with dyslexia. More importantly, we examined the associations between dyslexia and distinct types of visual searches, to determine whether deficits are specific to some visual searches but not others. Methods: The dyslexic children and their age-matched typical peers completed both the inefficient and relatively efficient search tasks. Results: The dyslexic children were generally impaired in visual searches, although the deficit in inefficient searches was more severe than in efficient searches. After phonological awareness, working memory and nonverbal IQ were considered; inefficient searches were found to be selectively impaired. Conclusions: These findings suggest that visual search deficits in dyslexia are universal across alphabetic and logographic writing systems. They highlight the importance of further study on the role of top-down attention on reading.

This study aims to bridge the research gap in the humour comprehension problems of individuals with dyslexia in Chinese culture. We conducted a nonexperimental study to examine the differences between Chinese adolescents with and without dyslexia in visual humour comprehension as well as the group differences in the correlation of visual humour comprehension with other abilities. In total, 48 Chinese adolescents (16 individuals with dyslexia and 32 individuals without dyslexia) were recruited in Hong Kong. They were all administered several tasks: tests of nonverbal IQ, Chinese character reading, visual-spatial attention, orthographic knowledge, and visual humour comprehension. Our results indicated that visual humour comprehension is correlated with other abilities. Additionally, the group with dyslexia performed significantly less accurately on most tasks except humour comprehension accuracy. However, only visual spatial attention, orthographic knowledge, and humour comprehension speed significantly predicted membership in the two groups. Finally, approximately half of the participants with dyslexia had significantly slower humour comprehension than those with typical development. Our findings shed light on problems with humour comprehension exhibited by Chinese individuals with dyslexia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This cross-sectional study aims to examine the age differences in state anxiety (i.e., anxiety triggered toward specific situations) as well as its relationship to the reading comprehension of Chinese students with and without dyslexia across school ages. In total, 131 typically developing students and 81 students with dyslexia in primary and secondary schools were recruited in Taiwan. Our results indicate that students with versus those without dyslexia have different patterns of state anxiety across the three age levels. In addition, we found similar patterns between students with dyslexia and those without across the three age levels in the effects of state anxiety on reading comprehension. However, the contributions of state anxiety to reading comprehension tended to decline as typically developing students matured, while they remained relatively constant for students with dyslexia across the three age levels. These results may have implications for teaching activities or examinations for students whose state anxiety has a significant impact on their reading comprehension skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes two studies that examined the lexical tone awareness of Chinese children both with and without dyslexia at different primary school ages. Study 1 examined the contributions of lexical tone awareness to distinguish children with and without dyslexia with respect to their Chinese character reading skills. Two hundred and seventy Chinese children participated in Study 1. Ninety of these were children with dyslexia (equally recruited from second, fourth, and sixth grades). Moreover, ninety children functioned as a chronological-age control group, and an additional ninety children functioned as a reading-level control group. The participants were tested for nonverbal intelligence, Chinese character reading, and cognitive-linguistic skills and lexical tone awareness. Our results revealed a later developmental ceiling in Chinese children with dyslexia than in those without dyslexia. Furthermore, children’s lexical tone awareness could serve to distinguish children with dyslexia from typically developing children in all primary school years. Study 2 compared the lexical tone awareness and Chinese character reading skills of Chinese children with dyslexia both before and after introducing the Perceptual Training Method. The participants in this study consisted of all the participants with dyslexia from Study 1, and the measurements were the Chinese character reading test and the lexical tone awareness task from Study 1. Our results revealed that only second-grade children with dyslexia gained substantially from the training on both lexical tone awareness and character naming, whereas those in the fourth grade obtained a significant improvement only on lexical tone awareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This study focused on a comparison of the visuo-spatial abilities (correct rate and speed) between dyslexic and normal students in Taiwan and Hong Kong. There were a total of 120 10–12 year old students. Thirty students had been diagnosed as dyslexic in Taiwan (T.W. dyslexia) and thirty students had been diagnosed as dyslexic in Hong Kong (H.K. dyslexia). Overall, 30 of the Taiwanese participants (T.W. normal) and 30 of the Hong Kong participants (H.K. normal) had received no special education. Dyslexic individuals were diagnosed by the doctors’ clinical determination. The material was designed using Autodesk 3ds Max. The participants rotated 3D figures by themselves to find a ball. The results indicated that there was very little difference between dyslexic and normal students. However, the most significant difference between dyslexic and normal student was answering speed, especially in the combined data and the male data. An one-way ANOVA test indicated that in terms of rate and answering speed there was no difference between the H.K. and the T.W. dyslexics. Similar results were also found for the students with normal reading abilities in T.W. and H.K. The criterions for defining the visuo-spatial abilities of dyslexia students appear to be similar in Taiwan and Hong Kong. In addition, there is no difference between students’ visuo-spatial abilities even though Chinese literacy instructions differed in the two areas. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This study aims to expand our understanding of the relations of oral reading fluency at word, sentence, and passage levels to reading comprehension in Chinese-speaking secondary school-aged students. In total, 80 participants (46 males and 34 females) ranging from 13 to 15 years old joined this study and were tested on tasks of oral reading fluency at three levels, reading comprehension, and nonverbal IQ. Our results showed a clear relationship from fluency at the level of the word to the sentence and then the passage in oral reading fluency as well as both the direct and indirect importance of word-level oral reading fluency in reading comprehension. Only the indirect effect from word-level oral reading fluency to reading comprehension through passage-level oral reading fluency was significant. Our findings suggest that sentence-level oral reading fluency is the crucial component to reading comprehension in Chinese. Additionally, recognition of the potential value of unique features, such as syntactic awareness and word segment accuracy, that happen at the sentence level should be integrated into instructional activities for reading., (© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.)

This study investigated the cross-sectional relationships between reading-related affective and cognitive factors and reading skills among adolescents with and without dyslexia. Participants were 120 Chinese-speaking eighth graders, including 60 adolescents with dyslexia and 60 typically developing adolescents from Hong Kong, China. Adolescents completed questionnaires on general anxiety, reading anxiety, and reading self-concept. They were also assessed on measures of rapid digit naming, verbal working memory, word reading, reading fluency, and reading comprehension. The results showed that readers with dyslexia reported higher levels of general anxiety and reading anxiety and lower levels of reading self-concept than typical readers. They also showed difficulties in rapid digit naming and verbal working memory. Importantly, controlling for rapid digit naming and verbal working memory, reading self-concept was uniquely associated with word reading and reading fluency for readers with and without dyslexia. Furthermore, reading anxiety and reading self-concept were uniquely associated with reading comprehension for the two groups of readers. The findings point to the importance of considering affective factors when examining the reading skills of Chinese readers and the utility of targeting these factors when supporting the learning of adolescents with and without dyslexia., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

The current study aims to examine prosodic sensitivity in Chinese children with dyslexia and its relation to Chinese reading in children with and without dyslexia. A total of 172 Chinese children from third grade to sixth grade in Taiwanese primary schools were recruited. Thirty (14 male) children were identified as having dyslexia, and the remaining children (N = 142; 67 male) were typically developing children matched with those with dyslexia as carefully as possible with respect to school, grade, and gender. Our results indicated that group differences were found for all three types of prosodic sensitivity. Moderation analyses showed that group had no significant interaction with prosodic sensitivity in predicting Chinese reading, so the participants in the two groups were combined in the following analyses. The results of the stepwise regression analyses showed that only lexical tone awareness could significantly predict Chinese character reading after controlling for phonological awareness, while only intonation awareness could significantly predict reading comprehension after controlling for Chinese character reading. The results provide preliminary evidence on the issue of prosodic sensitivity in Chinese children with dyslexia and its role in Chinese reading, which might provide a novel approach to the teaching of Chinese languages., (© 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

This study aims to compare anxiety and depression among male and female Chinese children with and without reading disabilities (RDs) and to examine the diverse impacts of anxiety and depression on children's reading comprehension. A total of 132 Chinese children from third to sixth grade living in Taiwan were recruited; half had RD, and the other half were typically developing children. Our results from the first analysis revealed that the anxiety level of female children with RD was significantly higher than that of the other three groups of participants, while the depression level of typically developing children was significantly lower than that of children with RD in general. Additionally, our results regarding the predictive abilities of gender and anxiety for reading comprehension as well as the moderating effect of gender on the ability of anxiety to predict reading comprehension were all statistically significant for the typically developing group but not the RD group. These differences between these two groups were further confirmed by multi-group analysis. Our results enhance the existing knowledge on Chinese children with RD and can increase practitioners' awareness of the possibility of higher levels of anxious and depressive symptoms among these children., (© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

The co-morbidity of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and reading disorder (RD) is more frequent than expected. This investigation assessed the potential uniqueness of the co-morbidity of ADHD and RD and extended existing findings to the Chinese language. A parallel group design with a post hoc analysis of group differences was employed to compare 4 groups of children (30 with ADHD, 33 with RD, 28 with ADHD + RD, and 30 typically developing) regarding their reading comprehension, attention, reading-related abilities, and cognitive abilities. The findings indicated that children with RD and/or ADHD symptom(s) exhibited diverse cognitive profiles, and the distinguishing factor contributed to different inhibitions. Additionally, Chinese-speaking children with the co-morbid symptoms of RD and ADHD demonstrated greater deficits in auditory working memory and rapid naming than did the pure-deficit groups. Furthermore, although problems with phonological awareness were similar between the 2 groups, the deficiency of orthographic knowledge was more severe in children with RD than in the co-morbid group. The ADHD + RD group's cognitive and reading-related abilities displayed a relatively complicated pattern that should be considered in the diagnosis of either RD or ADHD and their remediation design., (Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)

This present study focuses on classifying developmental dyslexia by combining two famous models, the dual-route model and the triangle model of Chinese reading, re-examining validity of the subtypes, and observing the error types of word recognition for each subtype. Sixty-sixth graders with dyslexia in Chinese and 45 sixth graders who were matched by age and IQ with the dyslexic group were involved in the present study. Twelve (20%) sixth graders from the dyslexic group were classified as having phonological dyslexia, 11 (18.3%) were classified as surface dyslexia, 12 (20%) were classified as deep dyslexia, and five (8.3%) of them were classified as displaying more than one kind of deficit. Besides, still more than half (31; 51.7%) of the dyslexic group did not belong to any subtypes here. These subtypes had a good validity based on comparison of their phonological awareness, orthography, and semantics. Finally, for their error types of word recognition, both children with multiple-deficit dyslexia and children with non-subtype dyslexia showed a proportional pattern of six kinds of errors. Children with phonological dyslexia showed more phonetic errors and analogy errors, children with surface dyslexia showed more visual errors and analogy errors, and children with deep dyslexia showed more semantic errors and selective errors., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)