Psychological Development and Education ›› 2014, Vol. 30 ›› Issue (5): 457-465.

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The Development of Chinese Orthographic Awareness in Pre-school Children

LIU Ni-na1,2, TONG Wen1,2, YAN Guo-li1,2   

  1. 1. Academy of Psychology and Behavior, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin 300074;
    2. School of Education Science, Tianjing Normal University, Tianjing 300387, China
  • Online:2014-09-15 Published:2014-09-15

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Abstract: It is widely reported that the acquirement of orthographic awareness is an important aspect of emergent literacy which linked to the processing of reading. Have the preschool children being in the period of emergent literacy begun to develop the orthographic awareness and how far? Two studies were designed to investigate the development of Chinese orthographic awareness in preschool children. In study 1, 152 pre-school children aged from 3 to 7 were instructed to complete the character decision task containing 4 different kinds of stimulus: non-characters with the radical in illegal form(IC), non-characters with the radical in illegal position (ICP), pseudo-characters and real characters. The results showed that children in bottle class acquired nothing about orthographic knowledge; in comparison, the level of radical position awareness increased significantly for the children in middle class; and both the level of radical position awareness and radical awareness improved significantly for children in top class than that for children in bottle and middle class. Additionally, the level of children's radical position awareness was higher than that of radical awareness in top class. In study 2, the eye movements of 24 children in top class were recorded as they did the character decision task as same as in study 1.The result showed that children paid more attention on the target radicals of IC/ICP than that of pseudo-characters. To conclude, the results of current two studies using different methods consistently indicated that pre-school children had acquired the awareness of radical position as well as the awareness of radical before they received formal reading instruction. However, the level was still low.

Key words: orthographic awareness, radical, pre-school children, eye movements

CLC Number: 

  • B844.1
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