This study investigated the relative contribution of syntactic awareness to Chinese reading among Chinese-speaking adolescent readers with and without dyslexia. A total of 78 junior high school students in Hong Kong, 26 dyslexic adolescent readers, 26 average adolescent readers of the same age (chronological age control group) and 26 younger…

This study aims to investigate the relation of syntactic and discourse skills to morphological skills, rapid naming, and working memory in Chinese adolescent readers with dyslexia and to examine their cognitive-linguistic profiles. Fifty-two dyslexic readers (mean age, 13;42) from grade 7 to 9 in Hong Kong high schools were compared with 52…

Dyslexia appears to be the most prevalent disability of students with special educational needs in many mainstream classes, affecting around 9.7% of the school population in Hong Kong. The education of these students is therefore of great concern to the community. In the present paper research into dyslexia in the Chinese language is briefly…

The authors report on the development of a brief dyslexia screening measure based on revising the 65-item Hong Kong Behaviour Checklist of Specific Learning Difficulties in Reading and Writing. Teachers' ratings of 1063 primary students aged 6-14 years on the behaviour checklist provided data for its psychometric evaluation using traditional…

Because Chinese character learning typically relies heavily on rote character copying, we tested independent copying skill in third- and fourth-grade Chinese children with and without dyslexia. In total, 21 Chinese third and fourth graders with dyslexia and 33 without dyslexia (matched on age, nonverbal IQ, and mother's education level) were given…

The present study sought to identify cognitive abilities that might distinguish Hong Kong Chinese adolescents with dyslexia and to assess how these abilities were associated with Chinese word reading, word dictation, and reading comprehension. The cognitive skills of interest were morphological awareness, visual-orthographic knowledge, rapid…

Data of item responses to the Hong Kong Specific Learning Difficulties Behaviour Checklist from 673 Chinese primary grade students were analyzed using the dichotomous Rasch measurement model. Rasch scaling suggested that the data fit the model adequately with a latent dimension of global dyslexic dysfunctioning. Estimates of item attributes and…

Background: Previous research has shown a relationship between speech perception and dyslexia in alphabetic writing. In these studies speech perception was measured using phonemes, a prominent feature of alphabetic languages. Given the primary importance of lexical tone in Chinese language processing, we tested the extent to which lexical tone and…

The present study sought to identify cognitive abilities that might distinguish Hong Kong Chinese adolescents with and without dyslexia and examined the cognitive profile of dyslexic adolescents in order to better understand this important problem. The performance of 27 Chinese adolescents with childhood diagnoses of dyslexia was compared with 27…

Based on the data of a school-referred sample of Cantonese-speaking Chinese children who met the Hong Kong criterion of dyslexia, we estimated for developmental dyslexia of Chinese children aged between 6 and 10 1/2 in Hong Kong an incidence rate of 0.66% and a gender ratio of 3.29 boys to 1 girl over a four-year period. We also explored the…

The dual-route model offers a popular way to classify developmental dyslexia into phonological and surface subtypes. The current study examined whether this dual-route model could provide a framework for understanding the varieties of Chinese developmental dyslexia. Three groups of Chinese children (dyslexics, chronological-age controls, and…

The present study examined word learning difficulties in Chinese dyslexic children, readers of a nonalphabetic script. A total of 105 Hong Kong Chinese children were recruited and divided into three groups: Dyslexic (mean age 8;8), CA control (mean age 8;9), and RL control (mean age 6;11). They were given a word learning task and a familiar word…

This study examined temporal processing in relation to Chinese reading acquisition and impairment. The performances of 26 Chinese primary school children with developmental dyslexia on tasks of visual and auditory temporal order judgement, rapid naming, visual-orthographic knowledge, morphological, and phonological awareness were compared with…

Based on the data of the normative study of the "Hong Kong test of specific learning difficulties in reading and writing," and the "Test of visual-perceptual skills (non-motor)-Revised," 99 children aged between 6 and 10 1/2 years were identified as children with dyslexia out of the normative sample of 690 children. By…

Primary school teachers rated the frequency of occurrence of 65 reading-related behavioural characteristics in a sample of 251 Grade 1 to Grade 6 Chinese school children in Hong Kong. These behavioural characteristics were in the areas of general performance, reading, dictation, writing, mathematics, language, memory, concentration, sequential…