| About 10%of children can be diagnosed as having developmental dyslexia.Studies have already shown that children with developmental dyslexia have difficulties in word recognition and reading comprehension.Different ways of word segmentation can lead to varied understanding of the text.However,unlike English,there are no spaces between words to mark the word boundary in Chinese,which puts forward higher requirements for Chinese readers,especially for normal developing children and dyslexic children who are not yet proficient in reading in primary school.Therefore,it has great theoretical and practical significance to explore whether word segmentation can promote the reading performance of children with dyslexia.In view of the difficulties in phonological processing and tonal classification perception,it is also interesting to further explore whether word segmentation is more helpful for dyslexia to read aloud than to read silently.In this study,selecting dyslexic children in 5th grade with their corresponding reading level-matched group and age-matched group as subjects,the effects of word segmentation on silent reading and oral reading were discussed.The main contents were shown as follows.Study 1 was conducted to identify children with developmental dyslexia.Combined Raven's Test and Character Recognition Measure and Assessment Scale for Primary School Children were administered to both grade 3 and grade 5 students from two ordinary primary schools in Tianjin.13 fifth-grade children with dyslexia were selected by means of Intelligence-Achievement Discrepancy Model.Study 2 included two experiments.Experiment 1 explored the effects of normal unspaced text,word spaced text,character spaced text and non-word spaced text on three groups of children's silent reading and oral reading.13 children of developmental dyslexia,14 reading-level matched children and 14 age-matched children participated in the experiment.Eye movement was recorded when they read sentences using Eyelink 2000.This experiment was a 3(type of subjects:dyslexic group,reading-level matched group and age--matched group)x 4(spaced condition:normal unspaced,word spaced,character spaced and non-word spaced)x 2(reading mode:silent reading,oral reading)mixed design,in which type of subject was a between-subject variable,and reading mode and spaced condition were within-subject variables.The results indicated that total sentence reading time and total fixation duration were shorter,and total number of fixations and number of forward fixations were less for age-matched group than dyslexic group and reading lever-matched group.Comparing to dyslexic group and age-matched group,reading level-matched group exhibited longer saccadic amplitude,but they also had more number of regressive fixations.There was a significant interaction effect between presentation conditions and reading modes on total fixation duration.When reading sentence aloud,total fixation duration of spaced text was shorter than other three space conditions.Total fixation duration of normal unspaced text and character spaced text was shorter than non-word spaced text,but the difference between normal unspaced text and character spaced text was not significant.When reading text silently,total fixation duration of word spaced text was not shorter than normal unspaced text.Total fixation duration of normal unspaced text and word spaced text was shorter than character spaced text and non-word spaced text.Experiment 2 further explored the effect of word segmentation on the three groups of children's silent reading and oral reading with the method of highlighting to segment words.13 children of developmental dyslexia,14 reading-level matched children and 13 age-matched children participated in the experiment.This experiment was a 3(type of subjects:dyslexic group,reading-level matched group and age--matched group)x 2(highlighting condition:normal,word)x 2(reading mode:silent reading,oral reading)mixed design,in which type of subjects was a between-subject variable,and reading mode and highlighting condition were within-subject variables.It was found that the main effect of subject types was the same as that of experiment 1.The interaction between presentation conditions and reading modes was significant on total sentence reading time,total number of fixations and number of forward fixations.Under the condition of oral reading,comparing to normal text,total sentence reading time was shorter,total number of fixations and number of forward fixations were less for highlighting that marked words.Under the condition of silent reading,the differences between word condition and normal condition on total sentence reading time and number of forward fixations were not significant,but total fixation counts of word condition were more than the normal condition.The main conclusions were made as follows:(1)Age-matched group had better reading performance than dyslexic group and reading level-matched group,but there was no difference between dyslexic group and reading level-matched group.These differences were not influenced by word segmentation and reading mode.(2)Word segmentation had facilitating effect on oral reading,but hadn't significant effect on silent reading.(3)The results support word segmentation and recognition model. |
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