title: Small wins big: analytic pinyin skills promote Chinese word reading.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T. Hong Kong.
authors.forename: Dan
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.forename: Catherine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: McBride-Chang
authors.forename: Hua
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Shu
authors.forename: Yuping
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Hong
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Juan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Dorit
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Aram
authors.forename: Iris
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Levin
mesh_terms: 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