Small Wins Big
Dan Lin, Catherine McBride-Chang, Hua Shu, Yuping Zhang, Hong Li, Juan Zhang, Dorit Aram, Iris Levin
Psychological Science · 2010 · Volume 21 · Issue 8
Abstract
The present study examined invented spelling of pinyin (a phonological coding system for teaching and learning Chinese words) in relation to subsequent Chinese reading development. Among 296 Chinese kindergartners in Beijing, independent invented pinyin spelling was found to be uniquely predictive of Chinese word reading 12 months later, even with Time 1 syllable deletion, phoneme deletion, and letter knowledge, in addition to the autoregressive effects of Time 1 Chinese word reading, statistically controlled. These results underscore the importance of children’s early pinyin representations for Chinese reading acquisition, both theoretically and practically. The findings further support the idea of a universal phonological principle and indicate that pinyin is potentially an ideal measure of phonological awareness in Chinese.
Keywords
pinyin, reading, phonological awareness, letter-name knowledge, kindergartners
Enable JavaScript for citation tools and additional paper interactions.