The Influence Of Phonological Awareness And Orthographic Awareness On The Reading Ability Of Children With Developmental Dyslexia In Chinese

Through the phonological awareness experiments and the orthographic aware-ness experiments,this study aimed to investigate whether Chinese dyslexic children(DD) possess impairments in the phonological awareness or the orthographic aware-ness and to explore the differences of the processing mechanism to recognize Chinese character between the Chinese dyslexic children (DD) and the reading level control group (RL).16 Chinese dyslexic children (DD) and 16 reading level controls (RL) were matched according to the literacy, the reading fluency, the intelligence and the moti-vation. The two groups of subjects were measured by the phonological awareness ex-periments and the orthographic awareness experiments,including the onset awareness trials, the rhyme awareness trials, the tone awareness trials, the phoneme awareness trials, the single stroke awareness trials and the stroke position awareness trials. Then we employed some statistical analysis of the accuracy of these experiments. On the basis of the consequences, we discussed the performance of the two groups and ana-lyzed the correlation relationship of the dyslexic group between the phonological awareness, the orthographic awareness and their reading abilities.The first part of this study found that the accuracy of four phonological experi-ments of the Chinese dyslexic children were significantly inferior to the reading level control group. These results showed that the Chinese dyslexic children possessed the phonological awareness deficit, namely the onset awareness deficit, the rhyme awareness deficit, the tone awareness deficit and the phoneme awareness deficit. The Chinese dyslexic children had poor sensitivity to the tiny sound units and could not finely process the onset, the rhyme, the tone and the phoneme. And compared with the onset awareness, the tone awareness and the phoneme awareness, the rhyme aware-ness of the two groups developed much better. Probably the rhyme in Chinese syllable carried more phonological information and was earlier to acquire.The second part of this study found that the accuracy of the two orthographic experiments was matched among the two groups. These results showed that the Chi-nese dyslexic children did not possess the orthographic awareness deficit. The ability of the dyslexic group to judge false words and no words was equal to that of the con-trol group. And compared with the single stroke awareness, the stroke position awareness of the two groups developed much better. Because of the limited structure models of Chinese character,these structure models were easier and earlier to acquire.Through the correlation analysis, the final part of this study found that the rela-tionship of the two groups were different between the phonological awareness, the orthographic awareness and their reading abilities. Accordingly, this study hypothe-sized that the processing mechanisms to recognize Chinese character among the two groups were not the same. The reading level control group could use the onset aware-ness, the rhyme awareness, the tone awareness to process the sound representations,including the onset, the rhyme and the tone and use the stroke position awareness to process the structure of Chinese character. But the Chinese dyslexic children only used the single stroke awareness to process the tiny units of Chinese character. If the Chinese dyslexic children process the onset of the syllable by the limited cognitive resources, the rate and accuracy of Chinese character recognition were affected.Generally, compared with the reading level control group, the Chinese dyslexia children possessed the phonological awareness,but did not possess the orthographic awareness. And the processing mechanisms to recognize Chinese character among the two groups were different.