Phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN), and verbal short-term memory (VSTM) deficits have been identified as risk factors for developmental dyslexia (DD) of alphabetic orthographies. Yet, these three facets of phonological skills in DD of Chinese, a logographic writing system, have rarely been investigated together. The present study aimed to investigate PA, RAN, and VSTM deficits in Chinese children with DD. We compared 128 third and fourth grade Mandarin-speaking Chinese children with DD aged between 8 and 11 years (mean age = 9.4 years, 73 male) and 135 age-matched controls on 7 phonological tasks, including 2 PA tasks (phoneme deletion and onset/rime deletion), 3 RAN tasks (digit, object, and color), and 2 VSTM task (spoonerism and digit span). A combination of logistic regression analysis and a machine learning approach with SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) methods was employed for data analyses. Logistic regression analysis showed that similar to the results from DD in six European languages by Landerl and Ramus et al. (2013), phoneme deletion and RAN digits played major roles in predicting Chinese DD, while digit span played a minor role. SHAP analysis revealed that the most effective predictor tasks for Chinese DD are RAN pictures, phoneme deletion, and spoonerism. The results suggest important roles of RAN and PA and a minor role of VSTM in predicting Chinese DD. Findings have important implications for the diagnosis and remediation of Chinese DD.
It has been widely accepted that phonological awareness (PA), rapid automatized naming (RAN), and verbal short-term memory (VSTM) deficits are three core facets of phonological deficits in developmental dyslexia (DD) of alphabetic orthographies. Yet, whether these three phonological facets also represent key phonological deficits of DD in Chinese, a logographic language, has never been investigated. The current study aimed to examine profiles of phonological deficits and comorbidity in Chinese DD. We tested 128 children with DD aged between 8 and 11 years and 135 age-matched controls on 9 tasks, including 2 PA tasks (phoneme deletion and onset/rime deletion), 3 RAN tasks (digit, object and color), 2 VSTM task (spoonerisms and digit span), an orthographic awareness task (orthographic judgment), and a morphological awareness task (morphological production). With the control of morphological and orthographic awareness, results from latent profile analysis revealed three latent profiles, namely the RAN deficit group, the severe PA deficit group, and the mild VSTM deficit group. Individual analysis using a Venn plot showed that 83.59% of DD exhibited phonological deficits, among whom 58.59% with RAN deficit, 49.22% with PA deficit, and 47.66% with VSTM deficit, and all three groups shared overlap. The results have important implications for the identification and remediation of Chinese DD.
more » « less- PAR ID:
- 10556399
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer Science + Business Media
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Reading and Writing
- ISSN:
- 0922-4777
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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