Author Description

This dissertation, "Investigating Cognitive Abilities in Chinese Reading and Dictation: a Training and Correlation Study" by Yujie, Qi,, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: This thesis examines the unique role of writing in reading and dictation as well as the common and unique cognitive abilities related to reading and dictation development among Chinese children. While it is generally accepted that phonological awareness is of critical importance for both reading and spelling in alphabetic languages (Goswami, 2000), writing seems to play an essential role in reading logographic Chinese. Recent correlation studies among young Chinese children (e.g., Tan et al., 2005) and training studies among adult second language learners of Chinese (e.g., Guan et al., 2011) showed that writing is closely related to the learning of Chinese characters. To further examine the underlying mechanism of the contribution of writing in learning Chinese characters, this thesis compared writing training with reading-only training (Study 1a) and with orthographic training (Study 1b) among Grade One primary school children in Mainland China. Study 1 provides evidence of strong but differential writing facilitation effects on the learning of Chinese characters in various aspects including reading and dictation ability. As the findings of Study 1 showed that writing facilitation effect was stronger on dictation performance than on reading performance, it is hypothesized that reading and dictation in Chinese are not like reading and spelling in alphabetic languages since Chinese has its own language-specific features.