Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T00:41:50.702Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Subsyllabic unit preference in young Chinese children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2008

MIN WANG*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park
CHENXI CHENG
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Min Wang, Department of Human Development, 3304P Benjamin Building, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742. E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

We reported three experiments investigating subsyllabic unit preference in young Chinese children. In Experiment 1, a Chinese sound similarity judgment task was designed in which 48 pair of stimuli varied in terms of shared subsyllabic units (i.e., vowel, body, rime, onset-coda). Grade 1 Chinese-speaking monolingual children judged pairs with shared body units most similar. In Experiment 2, the sound similarity judgment tasks in Chinese and English were tested on a group of Chinese–English bilingual children. Grade 1 children judged shared-body pairs most similar in Chinese and shared-rime pairs most similar in English. In both experiments, preschool children showed a similar pattern of performance to the Grade 1 children in the Chinese task. In Experiment 3, sound matching tasks in Chinese and English were designed. Grade 1 bilingual children again showed a preference for matching body over rime in Chinese, and for matching rime over body in English. Taken together, these results support the hypotheses that the subsyllabic unit preference in Chinese is driven by the spoken language properties, and that there exist cross-language differences in processing spoken syllables.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Adams, M. J. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Bertelson, P., de Gelder, B., & van Zon, M. (1997). Explicit speech segmentation and syllabic onset structure: Developmental trends. Psychological Research, 60, 183191.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cardoso-Martins, C. (1994). Rhyme perception: Global or analytical? Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 57, 2641.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeFrancis, J. (1989). Visible speech: The diverse oneness of writing systems. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dijkstra, T., & Van Heuven, W. J. B. (2002). The architecture of the bilingual word recognition system: From identification to decision. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 5, 175197.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Duncan, L. G., Seymour, P. H. K., & Hill, S. (1997). How important are rhyme and analogy in beginning readers? Cognition, 63, 171208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geudens, A., & Sandra, D. (2003). Beyond implicit phonological knowledge: No support for an onset-rime structure in children's explicit phonological awareness. Journal of Memory & Language, 49, 157182.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geudens, A., Sandra, D., & Martensen, H. (2005). Rhyming words and onset-rime constituents: An inquiry into structural breaking points and emergent boundaries in the syllable. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 92, 366387.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gombert, J. E. (1992). Meta-linguistic development. Harvester: Wheatsheaf.Google Scholar
Goswami, U. (1993). Toward an interactive analogy model of reading development: Decoding vowel graphemes in beginning reading. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 56, 443475.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goswami, U. (1998). The role of analogies in the development of word recognition. In Metsala, J. L. & Ehri, L. C. (Eds.), Word recognition in beginning literacy (pp. 41630). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Goswami, U., & Bryant, P. (1990). Phonological skills and learning to read. Hove: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Goswami, U., Gombert, J., & Barrera, L. (1998). Children's orthographic representations and linguistic transparency: Nonsense word reading in English, French, and Spanish. Applied Psycholinguistics, 19, 1952.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huang, B. R., & Liao, X. D. (2002). Contemporary Chinese. Beijing: High Educational Press.Google Scholar
Hulme, C., Hatcher, P. J., Nation, K., Brown, A., Adams, J., & Stuart, G. (2002). Phoneme awareness is a better predictor of early reading skill than onset-rime awareness. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 82, 228.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kessler, B., & Treiman, R. (1997). Syllable structure and the distribution of phonemes in English syllables. Journal of Memory and Language, 37, 295311.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kroll, J., & Stewart, E. (1994). Category interference in translation and picture naming: Evidence for asymmetric connections between bilingual memory representations. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 149174.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Li, G., & Liu, R. (1988). A dictionary of Chinese character information. Beijing: Science Press.Google Scholar
Mattingly, I. G. (1992). Linguistic awareness and orthographic form. In Frost, R. & Katz, L. (Eds.), Orthography, phonology, morphology, and meaning (pp. 1126). Amsterdam: Elsevier Science.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perfetti, C. A. (1999). Comprehending written language: A blueprint of the reader. In Brown, C. & Hagoot, P. (Eds.), The neurocognition of language (pp. 167208). New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Perfetti, C. A., Beck, I., Bell, L. C., & Hughes, C. (1987). Phonemic knowledge and learning to read are reciprocal: A longitudinal study of first grade children. Merrill–Palmer Quarterly, 33, 283319.Google Scholar
Perfetti, C. A., Liu, Y., & Tan, L. H. (2005). The lexical constituency model: Some implications of research on Chinese for general theories of reading. Psychological Review, 112, 4359.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Selkirk, E. (1984). On the major class features and syllable theory. In Aronoff, M. & Oehrle, R. (Eds.), Language sound structure (pp. 98119). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Share, D., & Blum, P. (2005). Syllable splitting in literate and preliterate Hebrew speakers: Onsets and rimes or bodies and codas? Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 92, 182202.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Siok, W. T., & Fletcher, P. (2001). The role of phonological awareness and visual-orthographic skills in Chinese reading acquisition. Developmental Psychology, 37, 886899.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Spencer, A. (1996). Phonology: Theory and description. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Stanovich, K. E., Cunningham, A. E., & Cramer, B. B. (1984). Assessing phonological awareness in kindergarten children: Issues of task comparability. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 38, 175190.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Treiman, R. (1986). The division between onsets and rimes in English syllables. Journal of Memory and Language, 25, 476491.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Treiman, R. (1995). Errors in short-term memory for speech: A developmental study. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21, 11971208.Google ScholarPubMed
Treiman, R., & Danis, C. (1988). Short-term memory errors for spoken syllables are affected by the linguistic structure of the syllables. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 14, 145152.Google ScholarPubMed
Treiman, R., Mullennix, J., Bijeljac-Babic, R., & Richmond-Welty, E. D. (1995). The special role of rimes in the description, use and acquisition of English orthography. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 124, 107136.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Yip, M. (2002). Tone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yoon, H. K., Bolger, D. J., Kwon, O.-S., & Perfetti, C. A. (2002). Sublexical processes in learning to read: A difference between Korean and English. In Vehoeven, L., Elbro, C., & Reisman, P. (Eds.), Precursors of functional literacy (pp. 139163). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yoon, Y. B., & Derwing, B. L. (2001). A language without a rhyme: Syllable structure experiments in Korean. Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 46, 187238.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yopp, H. K. (1988). The validity and reliability of phonemic awareness tests. Reading Research Quarterly, 23, 159177.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ziegler, J. C., & Goswami, U. (2005). Reading acquisition, developmental dyslexia and skilled reading across languages: A psycholinguistic grain size theory. Psychological Bulletin, 131, 329.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed