Written Word Learning in Chinese Children: Its Underlying Mechanisms and the Influences of Reading Experience and Ability

Learning to read is a key task in child development. Children have to acquire thousands of written words during reading development. This effortful process involves continuous practice and the mastery of various cognitive-linguistic skills. To date, research on children's word reading development has focused on reading outcomes. The process through which children undergo learning new words is far from well understood. The project investigates the underlying mechanisms of Chinese written word learning in children (written word learning will hereafter be denoted by word learning). It adopts a new angle – the main focus is on dynamic learning processes rather than static reading outcomes. This is the first research to develop and employ an extended associative learning paradigm, which uses a unique set of novel word stimuli to isolate the effects of prior word experience to test Chinese word learning processes. The paradigm will provide a comprehensive picture of Chinese word learning by examining the roles of linguistic and orthographic knowledge in learning new words. Additionally, the developmental pattern of word learning is a main focus of this project. Using existing phase models of reading as our theoretical framework, we propose and test a phase model, which hypothesizes that qualitative differences exist in word learning mechanisms among children with different levels of reading experience and ability, from pre-analytic to full analytic phases. We will examine the influence of reading experience and ability on word learning using a cross-sectional design. A total of 150 typically developing Chinese children from three grade levels (kindergarten second grade, primary second grade, and primary fifth grade) will be individually administered tasks of novel word learning, Chinese word reading, nonverbal IQ and memory abilities. Altogether, the project findings will make significant contributions to three critical issues regarding Chinese word learning. First, they will reveal the influences of prior linguistic knowledge, including phonology and semantics, on word learning. Second, they will unravel the underlying mechanisms of word learning in relation to the utilization of holistic versus analytic approaches. The holistic approach focuses on rote memorization of whole units, while the analytic approach emphasizes the use of orthographic knowledge in learning words. Third, they will demonstrate how word learning mechanisms operate in children with different levels of reading experience and ability. Ultimately, they will generate a dynamic word learning model that conceptualizes the interplay among linguistic knowledge, analytic processing of orthography, reading experience, and word learning in Chinese.