| The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships of phonological processing abilities (phonological awareness, verbal short-term memory, and rapid naming) and visual short-term memory to the reading performance of Chinese children with reading disabilities (RD). A battery of cognitive, phonological, and reading measures was individually administered to 162 Chinese children with RD (128 boys and 34 girls; 6--11 to 12--14 years old). Correlational analyses indicated that once the effect of verbal intelligence was partialled out, the variables most strongly related to word recognition were phonemic awareness, followed by the phonological awareness composite score; while rapid naming was the only variable to be significantly related to listening and reading comprehension scores. Neither verbal nor visual memory tasks showed significant relationships to any reading measures.; Stepwise regression analyses further showed that the relative contributions of the phonological processing variables to the variance of reading differed depending on types of reading tasks measured. With verbal intelligence controlled, rapid naming added a significant but small amount of variance in listening comprehension, reading comprehension, and the reading composite scores; and the phonological awareness composite scores accounted for slightly larger unique variance than rapid naming in the prediction of word recognition scores.; Finally, results suggested that there were differences in the relationships between phonological processing, visual short-term memory, and reading ability in younger and older children with RD. The participants were further divided into the younger (1st, 2nd, and 3rd graders) and older RD groups (4th, 5th, and 6th graders). For younger disabled readers, only the performance on the rapid naming task added an independent contribution to the variance in reading measures. However, for older disabled readers, verbal intelligence was the only significant predictor in all analyses with reading skills. The results confirm that the link between phonological processing and reading is likely to change during different time periods of reading development. Although phonological processing is essential in beginning reading, there is a trend for the importance of phonological processing to decrease m the higher grades. |
