title: Visual perceptual abilities of Chinese-speaking and English-speaking children.
abstract: This paper reports an investigation of Chinese-speaking and English-speaking children's general visual perceptual abilities. The Developmental Test of Visual Perception was administered to 41 native Chinese-speaking children of mean age 5 yr. 4 mo. in Hong Kong and 35 English-speaking children of mean age 5 yr. 2 mo. in Melbourne. Of interest were the two interrelated components of visual perceptual abilities, namely, motor-reduced visual perceptual and visual-motor integration perceptual abilities, which require either verbal or motoric responses in completing visual tasks. Chinese-speaking children significantly outperformed the English-speaking children on general visual perceptual abilities. When comparing the results of each of the two different components, the Chinese-speaking students' performance on visual-motor integration was far better than that of their counterparts (ES = 2.70), while the two groups of students performed similarly on motor-reduced visual perceptual abilities. Cultural factors such as written language format may be contributing to the enhanced performance of Chinese-speaking children's visual-motor integration abilities, but there may be validity questions in the Chinese version.
authors: School of Teacher Education, Faculty of Education, Charles Stuart University, Bathurst, NSW, Australia. mlai@csu.edu.au
authors: Mun Yee
authors: MY
authors: Lai
authors: Frederick Koon Shing
authors: FK
authors: Leung
mesh_terms: D044466:Asian People; D001315:Australia; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D005260:Female; D006723:Hong Kong; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D044465:White People