title: A Developmental Study of Chinese Children's Word and Character Reading.
abstract: To investigate the relationship between Chinese children's character and word reading, 62 third and 50 fifth grade children in Hong Kong were asked to read single characters and words that were comprised of these characters. Results showed that words helped children to recognize characters for both grades of children. Compared to older children, younger children's character reading was more likely to rely on the word that the character appeared in as a component; younger children made more errors in confusing the correct character with words related to it. Younger children's greater rate of meaning-related errors also underscored the role of the word in their character learning. This study confirmed the important role of words in children's character learning, and provided evidence for a developmental pattern of character and word reading in Chinese.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong, SAR, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Tong
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong, SAR, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Ying
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Center for Cognition and Brain Disorders, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Xiuhong
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Tong
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong, SAR, People's Republic of China. cmcbride@psy.cuhk.edu.hk.
authors.forename: Catherine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: McBride
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006723:Hong Kong; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011932:Reading
keywords: Character-level errors; Developmental trend; Reading strategy; Word-level errors