Small wins big: analytic pinyin skills promote Chinese word reading.
The present study examined invented spelling of pinyin (a phonological coding system for teaching and learning Chinese words) in relation to subsequent Chinese reading development. Among 296 Chinese kindergartners in Beijing, independent invented pinyin spelling was found to be uniquely predictive of Chinese word reading 12 months later, even with Time 1 syllable deletion, phoneme deletion, and letter knowledge, in addition to the autoregressive effects of Time 1 Chinese word reading, statistically controlled. These results underscore the importance of children's early pinyin representations for Chinese reading acquisition, both theoretically and practically. The findings further support the idea of a universal phonological principle and indicate that pinyin is potentially an ideal measure of phonological awareness in Chinese.
Lin
Dan
D
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T. Hong Kong.
McBride-Chang
Catherine
C
Shu
Hua
H
Zhang
Yuping
Y
Li
Hong
H
Zhang
Juan
J
Aram
Dorit
D
Levin
Iris
I
D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D002681:China; D004522:Educational Status; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D011932:Reading