Early vocabulary development benefits from diverse lexical exposures within children's language environment. However, the influence of lexical diversity on children as they enter middle childhood and are exposed to multimodal language inputs remains unclear. This study evaluates global and local aspects of lexical diversity in three…

The relationship between executive function and second-language ability remains contentious in bilingual children; thus, the current study focused on this issue. In total, 371 Uyghur-Chinese bilingual children ranging from 3 to 6 years old were assessed by a battery of tasks measuring language ability (expressive vocabulary tests, receptive…

Most behavioral interventions on reading disability (RD) have been developed in alphabetic languages and are phonologically-based. Chinese is a morpho-syllabic language in which each character represents a morpheme and a syllable. Therefore, phonologically-based interventions may not be most helpful in Chinese. In this study, we compared a…

This study investigates the longitudinal predictors of the development of Chinese word reading skills and potential bidirectional relationships between Chinese word reading and oral language skills. We examine, in a 2-year longitudinal study, a wide range of theoretically important predictors (phonological awareness, tone awareness, morphological…

Prior work has extensively studied neural deficits in children with reading impairment (RI) in their native language but has rarely examined those of RI children in their second language (L2). A recent study revealed that the function of the local brain regions was disrupted in children with RI in L2, but it is not clear whether the disruption…

The acquisition of language involves the functional specialization of several cortical regions. Connectivity between these brain regions may also change with the development of language. Various studies have demonstrated that the arcuate fasciculus was essential for language function. Vocabulary learning is one of the most important skills in…

Auditory processing capabilities at the subcortical level have been hypothesized to impact an individual's development of both language and reading abilities. The present study examined whether auditory processing capabilities relate to language development in healthy 9-month-old infants. Participants were 71 infants (31 boys and 40 girls) with…

The present study reported data on phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and Chinese literacy skills of 294 children from an 8-year longitudinal study. Results showed that mainland Chinese children's preliterate syllable awareness at ages 4 to 6 years uniquely predicted post-literate morphological awareness at ages 7 to 10 years.…

This study considered how far nonverbal cognitive, language and reading abilities are affected by common genetic influences in a sample of 312 typically developing Chinese twin pairs aged from 3 to 11 years. Children were individually given tasks of Chinese word reading, receptive vocabulary, phonological memory, tone awareness, syllable and rhyme…

Two studies explored the nature of phonological awareness (PA) in Chinese. In Study 1, involving 146 children, awareness of phoneme onset did not differ from chance levels at ages 3-5 years in preschool but increased to 70% correct in first grade, when children first received phonological coding (Pinyin) instruction. Similarly, tone awareness was…