Department of Psychology, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
J Child Lang. 2011 Sep;38(4):793-808. doi: 10.1017/S0305000910000346. Epub 2010 Nov 22.
This study examined the extent and nature of lexical tone deficit in Chinese developmental dyslexia. Twenty Cantonese-speaking Chinese dyslexic children (mean age 8;11) were compared to twenty average readers of the same age (CA control group, mean age 8;11), and another twenty younger average readers of the same word reading level (RL control group, mean age 7;4) on different measures of lexical tone awareness, rhyme awareness and visual-verbal paired-associate learning. Results showed that the Chinese dyslexic children performed significantly worse than the CA but not the RL control groups in nearly all the lexical tone and rhyme awareness measures. Analyses of individual performance demonstrated that over one-third of the dyslexic children showed a deficit in some aspects of tone awareness. Tone discrimination and tone production were found to correlate significantly with Chinese word reading. These findings confirm that Chinese dyslexic children show weaknesses in tone awareness.
本研究考察了中文发展性阅读障碍中词汇声调缺陷的程度和性质。20 名粤语为母语的中文阅读障碍儿童（平均年龄 8 岁 11 个月）与 20 名同年龄的普通阅读者（CA 对照组，平均年龄 8 岁 11 个月）和 20 名具有相同阅读水平的年龄较小的普通阅读者（RL 对照组，平均年龄 7 岁 4 个月）进行了不同的词汇声调意识、韵意识和视觉-词汇配对联想学习测试。结果表明，中文阅读障碍儿童在几乎所有的词汇声调意识和韵意识测试中，表现明显不如 CA 对照组，但与 RL 对照组没有差异。对个体表现的分析表明，超过三分之一的阅读障碍儿童在某些声调意识方面存在缺陷。声调辨别和声调产生与中文单词阅读显著相关。这些发现证实了中文阅读障碍儿童在声调意识方面存在弱点。
