| Developmental dyslexia is a prominent learning disability affecting a substantial number of school-age children,parents,and educators.Previous investigations into Chinese dyslexia predominantly focused on participants hailing from coastal regions and well-developed urban areas,with scant attention directed towards dyslexia among children residing in rural locales characterized by lower levels of economic development and education.Due to the relatively poor education level in rural areas,children may theoretically have a higher prevalence rate of dyslexia than children in urban areas.In addition,children’s dyslexia characteristics are likely to be different from those in urban areas due to structural differences in population and culture discrepancies between rural and urban areas.Most of the previous studies have focused on family socioeconomic status(SES)and home literacy environment(HLE).However,there are few studies on children’s psychological conditions,family educational atmosphere,as well as emergent literacy acquisition and family structures.In addition to focusing on family socioeconomic status(SES)and the home literacy environment(HLE),this study also studied the effects of family structure,birth rank of child,child’s own psychological condition,family educational atmosphere,and childhood education on the prevalence of dyslexia.In the study of cognitive-linguistic characteristics of dyslexia,previous studies have focused more on subtypes of cognitive-linguistic deficits,while the dynamic presentation and developmental patterns of linguistic and cognitive characteristics of children in each age group are lacking to be explored.In addition,the characteristics and developmental patterns of subcategorical deficits of each language cognitive characteristic are in urgent need of research.To address this research gap,the present study endeavors to bridge this disparity by selecting a cohort of 756 children,spanning grades 2 to 6,from a rural public primary school situated in Jiangxi province.The research aim is to conduct an extensive research inquiry into dyslexia,while addressing the following three research questions:Research question 1: What are the prevalence and current situation of Chinese developmental dyslexia in rural areas?Research question 2: What are the contributing factors of Chinese developmental dyslexia in rural areas? How do they influence the prevalence of dyslexia?Research Question 3: What are the profiles and developmental patterns of linguistic and cognitive skills in different grades?To answer the above three research questions,this study mainly used questionnaires,paper-and-pencil tests,and behavioral cognitive experiments to collect data.Dyslexia Behavioral Screening Scale for Primary School Students,Chinese Character Recognition Test,and Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices were used in the study.Moreover,the researcher has adapted the Family Questionnaire on Reading for Primary School Children with good reliability and validity.In the paper-and-pencil tests,the participants were given morphological awareness test,phonological awareness test,orthographic knowledge test,and rapid automatized naming test.In the cognitive behavioral experiment,the auditory and visual rapid processing tests based on E-prime 2.0 psychological experiment software were used in this study.Through statistical analysis of the collected data,this study had the following findings:First of all,the prevalence rate of dyslexia among rural children surveyed in this study was9.24%,which was higher than the prevalence rates of dyslexia among children in urban areas in the previous studies.The results showed that there was a significant difference in the prevalence of dyslexia by gender,with 11.49% and 5.63% for male and female children respectively.In addition,the prevalence of dyslexia showed a decreasing trend among different grades.Additionally,in the study of contributing factors,family structure,child’s birth ranking,father’s education level,father’s occupation,monthly per capita household income,child’s own psychological factors,overuse of digital devices,family educational atmosphere,home reading environment,and childhood reading activities all have some influence on the prevalence of dyslexia.The results of the binary logistic regression analysis showed that,among all the contributing factors,father’s educational level,monthly per capita household income,family structure,age of emergent literacy acquisition,child’s digital devices use,and family educational atmosphere played a major role.Moreover,rural dyslexic children at all grades had deficits in morphological awareness,phonological awareness,orthographic awareness,rapid naming,and rapid automatized naming.Nevertheless,in the current study,dyslexic children were mostly of the multiple deficit type.The most common types of deficits were phonological awareness deficits and visual temporal processing.The ANOVA and LSD post hoc tests of the standard Z-scores of each subtest for dyslexic children at each grade level showed that there was a developmental pattern of subcategorization of language awareness characteristics for dyslexic children from lower grades to higher grades.In addition,there were significant improvements in awareness of morpheme,grapheme,rhyme,Chinese character structure,and pseudo character among the dyslexic children.This study sheds light on diagnostic and intervention methods for children with dyslexia in rural areas,as well as ways for parents,teachers,and children to prevent and cope with dyslexia.First,parents in rural areas should pay attention to children’s childhood education so that children are exposed to language learning as early as possible,thus reducing the incidence of dyslexia.They should also pay attention to children’s psychological state and establish a good home literacy environment and family educational atmosphere to help children establish a good language acquisition environment and build a healthy psychology.Parents should also pay attention to their children’s use of electronic devices to prevent negative effects on children’s language acquisition.Second,teachers in rural areas should learn more about theories related to dyslexia,understand gender,age,and individual differences in dyslexia,and pay attention to major language cognitive deficits such as phonological awareness.Teachers should explore and pay attention to the language cognitive deficits of dyslexic children through regular tests and provide timely instructional interventions based on their cognitive-linguistic deficits characteristics. |
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