Interactions Of Phonology And Semantics During Reading And Spelling In Chinese Dyslexic Children

Children are already aware of the role of phonetic and semantic radicals in phonograms in middle-and high-grade of primary school.Some studies have found that there is interaction between the effect of phonetic radical and semantic radical when adults reading Chinese characters,but no experimental studies have directly found the interaction of phonological and semantic processing in sub-word level in children.Children with dyslexia have defect in phonological awareness and orthography awareness,and the mapping between orthography and phoneme(O-P)is weak in dyslexia.There are few studies on the use of phonetic and semantic radical by children with dyslexia.The study will explore the differences in sub-word processing among children with different reading levels,and whether children can use the rules provided by sub-word in spelling,just as in reading.The study first selected 29 dyslexic children,38 dyslexic children,and 36 normal children from 432 third and fourth grade in primary school.Study 1 explored the effect of phonemic radical in the recognition and spelling Chinese characters in normal and dyslexic children.Experiment 1a used a mixed experimental design of speaking aloud,3(group:dyslexia,difficulty,control)x2(familiarity:familiar/unfamiliar)x2(regularity:regular/irregular).The results found that the regularity effect of unacquainted words is greater than that of familiar in control group.While children with reading difficulties and dyslexia cannot directly extract familiar words from the psychological dictionary,and they read both familiar and unfamiliar words relying on the information of phonemic radical.In these two groups,there was no interaction between regularity and familiarity,and the regularity effect in the familiar words was greater than in the control group.Experiment 1b used the dictation task.The interaction between the familiarity and regularity of control group disappeared.Although the accuracy rate of dictation was lower in the difficult and dyslexia groups than in normal children,the regularity effect was not different from that in control group.Experiment 1c used a pseudo-character naming task,3(group)x 2(regularity:regular/irregular)mixed experimental design,the results found that children can use the regularity in the pseudo-character naming,but the effect of regularity in difficult and dyslexia group was smaller than that in control group.A experimental design of 3(groups)x 2(consistency:consistent/inconsistent)found that control and difficult groups had a consistent effect in naming pseudo-words.The effect of control group was greater than that of the difficult group,while the children of dyslexia group did not show a consistent effect.Study 2 explored the interaction between phonetic and semantic processing,and used a mixed experimental design of 3(group)x 2(consistency:high/low)x 2(transparency:high/low).Experiment 2a used the task of reading aloud.It was found that the low-consistent condition showed a greater transparency effect than the high-consistent in control group,while the difficult group and the dyslexia group did not have this interaction.Experiment 2b used dictation tasks and found that control group showed greater transparency effects in low-consistent conditions similarly to reading,,while the opposite is true for difficult and dyslexia groups,owning greater transparency effects in high-consistent conditions.In the experiments of this study,the following conclusions were reached:1.Normal children and children with dyslexia can use the information provided by phonemic radical.The regularity and consistency of normal children are significantly smaller than those of children with dyslexia when recognizing familiar Chinese characters,but when the difficulty of reading materials increases,the ability of normal children to use phonemic cues is significantly higher than that of children with dyslexia.Relative to consistency,children are more willing to use regularity,especially children with dyslexia.2.There are interactions between the phonetic and semantic radical in the two tasks of naming and dictation of normal children,both of which show that the transparency effect is stronger when the consistency is low.Children with dyslexia did not show interaction in the naming task,while in contrast to normal children in dictation,the transparency effect was stronger when the consistency was high.