The Developmental Characteristics Of Children 's Early Words And Its Relationship With Early Reading

Generally speaking, reading is one of the fundamental approaches to the children’s early learning. The process of reading needs readers’ reconstruction towards form, sound, and meaning of authentic words. Word identification is the premise of understanding sentences or whole texts, which needs word segmentation in the early stage. That is to say, segmentation is an extremely important step during word processing. The study of word awareness is a more active field in the current meta-language, and segmentation is an important part of word awareness. However, how children segment words form whole texts during reading? What are some of the characteristics of children’s word segmentation? These questions about alphabetic languages have made some achievements, but such previous studies have not completely reached consensus, especially in China, research on this issue is very scarce.’Space plays a crucial role in phonetic reading, which will facilitate reading English text and encourage readers’ word identification. While for Chinese ideogram, each character occupies the same space and the same size between words, also there are no obvious word boundary markers between words. But do Chinese readers need the word boundary? Assuming that children read the word spaced text during the early stage of development of their word awareness, the result that facilitates reading Chinese or interferes with reading will not be verified. This is the main problem in this thesis.This research will intend to conduct three researches on preschool children’s characteristics of word segmentation and influence on word identification as well as early reading. The detailed research and main findings are as follows.Research one:in order to examine the development and characteristics of the word segmentation of preschool children (age3-6), the research used verbal and written word strings as well as sentences segmentation tests based on every half a year old as an age-bracket. The results showed that:firstly, children from3.5to6.0years old have started to develop their word segmentation. During this period, children developed fastest from5to6years old. And children’s ability to develop word segmentation is steadier after6years of age. In that way, typical characteristics of each stage show that:children’s word segmentation was fuzzy from3.5to5.0years old, which performs that children think character, the whole word strings, and sentences as divisible units. Children’s word segmentation capabilities are sprout in about5.5years old, which performs that they consider characters as divisible units in the written segmentation tests. Children aged 5.5to6.0are in a period of initial development of the word segmentation. The children had the capacity to segment word form text preliminarily after6.5years old. It can conclude that the word segmentation of children in preschool stage has begun to develop. On the whole, the development of children’s ability of word segmentation has undergone refinement process from sentences to characters then to words or lexical chunks. Secondly, children aged3.5to5.5made more correct response in the oral task than children in the text task. In other words, children finished the oral task easier than the text task. And children aged6.0to6.5completed word segmentation tasks presenting in the form of substantially independent of language influence. Thus, it can be seen that different language form has an effect on children. Thirdly, children’s performance was much better in content words segmentation task than in function words segmentation task. And children’s performance was much better in simple words segmentation task than in compound words segmentation task. Also, children’s performance was much better in insignificant word strings or sentences segmentation task than in significant word strings or sentences segmentation task. Therefore, the word type has an effect on children.Research two:the top class children in a kindergarten (age6-6.5) were selected as the participants. This study explored whether the two types of spacing information (normal text without spaces and text with spaces between words) have an effect on children’s early word identification and sentence reading by using Tobii T60eye tracker. Then it analyzed the first fixation duration, single fixation duration, gaze duration, total number of fixations, total fixations time in the interesting region and mean fixation durations, total number of fixations, total reading time in the sentences individually. The results showed that:Sentences with word spaced format facilitated access to the early word identification for the top class children. Therefore, sentences with word spaced format facilitated access to the sentence reading for6year-old children, but this effect was no longer significant in the late stage.Research three:the present study has discussed the difference among normal text without space, lexical chunk segmentation, and word segmentation when the top class children (age6-6.5) read the text. The results found that there was not a significant effect on the segmentation for children’s reading comprehension, but children could take advantage of word segmentation to their reading comprehension.