Learning to write words may strengthen orthographic representations and thus support word-specific recognition processes. This hypothesis applies especially to Chinese because its writing system encourages character-specific recognition that depends on accurate representation of orthographic form. We report 2 studies that test this hypothesis in…

Investigates the development of phonetic awareness, and insight into the structure and function of Chinese characters that give a clue to pronunciation. Participants were 113 Chinese second, fourth, and sixth graders enrolled in a working-class Beijing, China elementary school. Results show that both character familiarity and character regularity…

Measures of phonological processing, speech perception, and Chinese character recognition were administered to Hong Kong Chinese three and four year-olds. A model predicting phonological awareness from vocabulary, short-term memory, and speech perception was supported. Both phonological awareness and letter naming predicted unique variance in…