A Series Of Studies On Phonological Processing And Visual-spatial Cognition Of Reading Disabilities In Chinese Readers

The debate on phonological processing and visual-spatial cognition of reading disabilities is a hot topic in the research area of reading disabilities (RD) all over the world. The study based on a series experiments in Chinese readers aims not only to examine thoroughly the roles of phonological processing and visual-spatial cognition of poor Chinese readers, but also to contribute to further understanding of the general characteristics of reading disabilities from the cross-cultural perspective. The findings of these experiments will supply the theoretical support to the evaluation of reading disabilities in Chinese and benefit improvement of Chinese learning of reading disabilities.The study employs various scientific methods, such as phonological segments tasks, pair-cancellation tasks, temporal processing technique and span tasks, By the comparison of normal readers, poor readers and hearing deficit readers in Chinese this study focus on the cognitive processing of Chinese poor readers, and explore the features of phonological awareness, visual processing speed, temporal processing and visual working memory.The first part of this dissertation is the literature review, which is carvers the cognitive processing research of RD both in the world and in China, such as the findings of the development history on RD, the popular research methods, the unsettled debates and the hot topics of this domain.The second part includes eight experiments, which illustrate respectively different features of the phonological awareness and the visual-spatial cognition of poor Chinese readers.With the methods of Chinese Phoneme Recognition Task, Chinese Rhyme Detection, and Chinese Phoneme Recognition and Location, and in comparison withthe normal readers and hearing deficit readers, the experiments 1-3 test the phonological awareness of Chinese of poor readers. The results of those experiments prove that those readers have deficiency of the phonological awareness.In comparison with the normal readers, the experiments 4-5 exam the natural sound perception, speech sound perceptions and Chinese tones of poor readers. The results show that there is no significant difference between normal readers and poor readers. Results of the experimentsl-5 lead to the conclusion that the problem of the phonological awareness of Chinese with reading disabilities is caused by the deficiency of the phonological processing rather than the disability of sound perception.Experiment 6 deals with a chain tests, such as the pair-pictures cancellation, pair-phrasal cancellation and so on, to compare the visual processing speed of normal readers, poor readers and hearing deficit readers. The results indicate that the poor readers are much slower than the normal readers in processing the visual information, and even have more difficult in reading with visual information of Chinese characters.The experiment 7 explores the different abilities of three groups of testes in processing temporal visual information, and the experiment 8 continues with the comparison of the visual working memory of these tests. The results show that the deficits on temporal processing and visual working memory are the characters of Chinese reading disabilities. Maybe these are the factors that affect the visual information processing speed and justify the existence of the deficiency of the temporal processing and visual working memory in readers with reading disabilities, which potentially slow down the visual processing speed of poor readers.In summary, since Chinese is a kind of logographic writing system, it relies fundamentally on the visual-spatial cognition ability. The results of a series of experiments in the research not only provide some evidence of the important role of phonological recoding in processing Chinese characters, but also prove that visual information processing deficits are closely related to reading difficulties in Chinese. The conclusion of this study reminds us to pay much attention to the function of phonological awareness in learning Chinese...