A growing body of evidence suggests that children with dyslexia in alphabetic languages exhibit visual-spatial attention deficits that can obstruct reading acquisition by impairing their phonological decoding skills. However, it remains an open question whether these visual-spatial attention deficits are present in children with dyslexia in…

Background: Executive function (EF) plays a crucial role in children's reading. However, previous studies were based on offline products of reading comprehension. Online research is needed to reveal the core mechanisms underlying children's reading processing. By measuring children's working memory (WM) and cognitive flexibility (CF), we…

There is a growing number of children learning to read in bilingual environments, yet research on the uniqueness of reading acquisition in these bilingual children, particularly L1 majority bilinguals, is limited. With a sample size of 690 4th-grade students, this study investigated predictors influencing L1 Chinese reading in Chinese-English…

Syntax, or sentence structure, plays a role in reading comprehension, but how students draw on their awareness of syntax in their reading remains unclear; the mechanism is even more ambiguous in bilingual students. In this study, we evaluated the direct and indirect contributions of syntactic awareness on first-language Chinese and second-language…

Word spacing is important in guiding eye movements during spaced alphabetic reading. Chinese is unspaced and it remains unclear as to how Chinese readers segment and identify words in reading. We conducted two parallel experiments to investigate whether the positional probabilities of the initial and the final characters of a multicharacter word…

The effects of transcription skills, comprising both spelling and handwriting fluency, on sentence writing among young Chinese as a second language (CSL) learners were evaluated and compared to those of reading and oral language using a one-year longitudinal study design. Various writing models postulated that transcription skills are essential in…

This study investigated the influence of various types of Chinese metalinguistic awareness on spelling through the mediation of character reading and copying, using a path model with young Chinese as a second language (CSL) learners. A total of 221 Grade 3 Hong Kong ethnic minority students were given a range of measures including Chinese…

In the present study, we explored the perceptual span of typically developing Chinese children in Grade 3 (G3) during their reading of age-appropriate sentences, utilizing the gaze contingent moving window paradigm. Overall, these Chinese children had a smaller perceptual span than adults, covering only one character leftward and two characters…

Word boundary information is not marked explicitly in Chinese sentences and word ambiguity happens in Chinese texts. This introduces difficulty to parse characters into words when reading Chinese sentences, especially for beginning readers. In an eye-tracking study, we tested whether explicit word boundary information as provided by alternating…

In this study, we examined the mechanism for the relationship between morphological awareness and Chinese character reading in a group of Hong Kong primary school children when they were in grade two (n = 176, mean age = 8.07) and grade three (n = 163, mean age = 9.02). The results showed that morphological awareness, morpheme family size and the…

This study intends to examine the reading process in Chinese of two young heritage language learners through the use of retrospective miscue analysis (RMA). Retrospective miscue analysis involves both the author and the reader in reflectively discussing the reader's oral reading miscues--responses that differ from the actual text. This study…

This study investigated the association of timed visual processing tasks varying in levels of phonological processing with word reading. We tested 293 Chinese children on Cross Out, Visual Matching, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and Chinese character recognition across three to five years. Children's character recognition at ages 6 and 7…

The present study explored the age-related changes of eye movement control in reading--that is, where to send the eyes and when to move them. Different orthographies present readers with somewhat different problems to solve, and this might, in turn, be reflected in different patterns of development of reading skill. Participants of different…

This study adopted eye movement miscue analysis research method to examine and illustrate the cognitive and psychological processes of meaning construction and error detection in reading Chinese. Eighteen Taiwanese grade five elementary students read a short Chinese text with six embedded errors. Results show that like earlier studies, only about…

The Malay language writing system is alphabetic and orthographically transparent. This study aimed to determine whether phonological processing skills predict Malay word-level literacy acquisition in Chinese children from a national-type Chinese primary school in Malaysia. A correlational study among 113 Year 1 Chinese children who are non-native…