The Effect Of Visual Processing On Children 's Early Reading

Reading is one of the basic abilities of individual all-round learning, and an important way for individuals to obtain knowledge and information. Reading comprehension is a process for readers to acquire information from texts, including the basic visual analysis, orthographic processing, phonological processing and semantic access, and the influencing factors of reading has been attracted attention in home and abroad. The relationship between phonological awareness and reading has gone deep in the study of western alphabetic writing, and provided a lot of support for the predictive effect of phonological awareness in reading comprehension. However, Chinese is an ideographic symbol system which combined shape, sound, and meaning,so that it has so much difference when compared with the western alphabetic writing, meanwhile the study about the relationship between phonological awareness and reading comprehension of Chinese children is poor, and the existing research results are not consistent. At the same time, Chinese characters expects much more visual processing because of its particularity, and the role of visual processing in reading have not reach a consensus. The study of relationship between visual processing and reading comprehension in Chinese preschool children are rare involved.Based on the above shortages, this research chose5.0-6.0year old children which grouped by half a year old as research object, so as to explore the relationship among visual perception,phonological awareness and early reading comprehension. We will explore the relationship between children’s visual processing and reading comprehension on the basis of clarifying the stages of visual processing and reading comprehension, and then investigate the developmental feature of children’s phonological awareness, and how phonological awareness affect children’s reading comprehension.At last, we will discuss how the intervention of phonological awareness affect the relationship between visual processing and children’s early reading comprehension.The first research takes the method of visual threshold test and digit span test to examine the subjects’visual perception ability and visual working memory, and uses the lexical comprehension test and sentence comprehension test to clarify the development of children’s reading comprehension, so as to explore the relationship between visual processing and reading comprehension of5.0-6.0years old children. The results showed that children’s visual perception and visual working memory capacity increased with age from5to6years old. The visual perception developed relatively stable at this age, while the visual working memory developed rapidly during the age of5.5-6.0.Children’s lexical comprehension and sentence comprehension increased with age from5to6years old. Boys and girls didn’t show gender difference. The static visual perception correlated significantly with children’s lexical comprehension and sentence comprehension, the visual working memory correlate significantly with children’s sentence comprehension. The relationship between dynamic visual perception and reading comprehension has not been demonstrated in this study.The second research use the phonological awareness tests, including the syllable awareness test, initials/finals distinguish test and tone awareness test,to explore the phonological awareness development characteristics of5.0-6.0years old children, and the relationship between phonological awareness and reading comprehension. The results found that children’s phonological awareness improved with age from5to6years old, and there was a correlation among various components within the phonological awareness. Boys and girls didn’t show gender difference. The phonological awareness and syllable awareness correlated significantly with children’s lexical comprehension and sentence comprehension.The third research try to clarify whether the intervention of phonological awareness affect the role of visual processing in reading comprehension on the basis of the previous study, so as to discuss how visual processing influence children’s reading comprehension. The results demonstrated that, the static visual perception was the only independent variable that entered the regression equation of the reading comprehension, however, the intervention of phonological awareness demonstrated that the phonological awareness appeared more influence than the role of visual processing.