Chinese Illiterates' Orthographic Awareness And Phonological Awareness And Their Development During Reading Ability Acquisition

Illiteracy as a result of family poverty or historical politics is vital for individual's development and life quality; many countries strike continuously to help illiterate people acquire literacy. But unfortunately few studies have investigated systematically on its trajectory, and how reading-related cognitive abilities change during and contribute to their language learning.Previous studies in alphabetical language have established that phonological awareness is the most critical ability for reading development and orthographic awareness also play a significant but less important role in language learning. However, there are controversies on whether the same holds for logographic language system like Chinese, which differ fundamentally from alphabetical language. Most of the researchers suggest orthographic awareness plays a more important role than phonological awareness, some even claim that Chinese literacy depends on skills other than phonological awareness. However, some researchers still claim that phonological awareness is also very important for Chinese early literacy development and the underlying mechanism is the same as alphabetical learning, there are even literature suggest that reading in Chinese doesn't depend on orthographic awareness. So there is no consensus on how these two abilities work in Chinese reading and its development.The present study explores 16 Chinese illiterates'orthographic awareness and phonological processing skills, and how these two aspects of abilities develop while these illiterates undergo a one-year long Chinese training. The orthographic awareness is assessed by lexical decision tasks involving discriminating real Chinese characters, pseudo-characters, non-characters (with wrong radical position), and stroke combinations (task 1), and discriminating real characters from various non-character stimuli (task 2). The phonological awareness tasks comprise of tone awareness, single-syllable onset similarity, single-syllable onset deletion, single-syllable rime similarity, single-syllable rime deletion, two-syllable onset similarity, two-syllable onset deletion, two-syllable rime similarity, two-syllable rime deletion.Compared with their literate counterparts (n=24), illiterate subjects are less proficient across orthographic awareness tasks, but equally bad in most of the phonological awareness tasks except two-syllable rime deletion. Multiple-regression analysis shows that orthographic awareness performance is the only significant predictor for literacy level across these two groups, but not phonological awareness or other cognitive abilities including verbal working memory, digital span, MMSE, calculation. These results suggest a core role of orthographic awareness for literacy achievement of Chinese elderly, but no significance of phonological awareness.Reading training take effects on illiterates'vocabulary, there are significant differences among their character recognition performance at three time points during the training course (F=13.038, p=.000). Illiterates'orthographic awareness performance improve very quickly, in most of the subtests their performance reach the plateau only after one month training, illiterates become sensitive to global differences more quickly than local differences. Contrary to the fast improvement of orthographic awareness, there is no significant reading-training effect on most of the phonological awareness tasks, except on one-syllable onset similarity and two-syllable rime similarity tasks.Taken together, these results reveal the existence of significant literacy effects on orthographic awareness, but no literacy effects on phonological awareness for Chinese, at least for Chinese elderly. These results suggest different mechanisms of reading acquisition across alphabetical and logographical language systems.