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.
Note: When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external site maintained by the publisher.
Some full text articles may not yet be available without a charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
What is a DOI Number?
Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from this site.
-
Abstract -
Abstract 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.
-
Cytosine base editors (CBEs) enable efficient cytidine-to-thymidine (C-to-T) substitutions at targeted loci without double-stranded breaks. However, current CBEs edit all Cs within their activity windows, generating undesired bystander mutations. In the most challenging circumstance, when a bystander C is adjacent to the targeted C , existing base editors fail to discriminate them and edit both Cs. To improve the precision of CBE, we identified and engineered the human APOBEC3G (A3G) deaminase; when fused to the Cas9 nickase, the resulting A3G-BEs exhibit selective editing of the second C in the 5′-C C -3′ motif in human cells. Our A3G-BEs could install a single disease-associated C-to-T substitution with high precision. The percentage of perfectly modified alleles is more than 6000-fold for disease correction and more than 600-fold for disease modeling compared with BE4max. On the basis of the two-cell embryo injection method and RNA sequencing analysis, our A3G-BEs showed minimum genome- and transcriptome-wide off-target effects, achieving high targeting fidelity.more » « less
-
Abstract Reading disability exhibited defects in different cognitive domains, including word reading fluency, word reading accuracy, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming and morphological awareness. To identify the genetic basis of Chinese reading disability, we conducted a genome‐wide association study (GWAS) of the cognitive traits related to Chinese reading disability in 2284 unrelated Chinese children. Among the traits analyzed in the present GWAS, we detected one genome‐wide significant association (
p < 5 × 10−8) on word reading fluency for one SNP on 4p16.2, within EVC genes (rs6446395,p = 7.33 × 10−10). Rs6446395 also showed significant association with Chinese character reading accuracy (p = 2.95 × 10−4), phonological awareness (p = 7.11 × 10−3) and rapid automatized naming (p = 4.71 × 10−3), implying multiple effects of this variant. The eQTL data showed that rs6446395 affected EVC expression in the cerebellum. Gene‐based analyses identified a gene (PRDM10) to be associated with word reading fluency at the genome‐wide level. Our study discovered a new candidate susceptibility variant for reading ability and provided new insights into the genetics of developmental dyslexia in Chinese children.