Siu Tik-Sze Carrey, McBride Catherine, Tse Chi-Shing, Tong Xiuhong, Maurer Urs
Department of Early Childhood Education, The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
Department of Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, China.
Front Psychol. 2018 Dec 12;9:2510. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02510. eCollection 2018.
Children traditionally learn to read Chinese characters by rote, and thus stretching children's memory span could possibly improve their reading in Chinese. Nevertheless, 85% of Chinese characters are semantic-phonetic compounds that contain probabilistic information about meaning and pronunciation. Hence, enhancing children's metalinguistic skills might also facilitate reading in Chinese. In the present study, we tested whether training children's metalinguistic skills or training their working-memory capacity in 8 weeks would produce reading gains, and whether these gains would be similar in Chinese and English. We recruited 35 second graders in Hong Kong and randomly assigned them to a metalinguistic training group ( = 13), a working-memory training group (10), or a waitlist control group (12). In the metalinguistic training, children were taught to analyze novel Chinese characters into phonetic and semantic radicals and novel English words into onsets and rimes. In the working-memory training, children were trained to recall increasingly long strings of Cantonese or English syllables in correct or reverse order. All children were tested on phonological skills, verbal working memory, and word reading fluency in Chinese and in English before and after training. Analyses of the pre- and post-test data revealed that only the metalinguistic training group, but not the other two groups, showed significant improvement on phonological skills in Chinese and English. Working-memory span in Chinese and English increased from the pre- to post-test in the working-memory training group relative to other two groups. Despite these domain-specific training effects, the two training groups improved similarly in word reading fluency in Chinese and English compared to the control group. Our findings suggest that increased metalinguistic skills and a larger working-memory span appear equally beneficial to reading fluency, and that these effects are similar in Chinese and English.
传统上，孩子们通过死记硬背来学习汉字，因此拓展孩子们的记忆广度可能会提高他们的中文阅读能力。然而，85%的汉字是形声字，包含有关意义和发音的概率信息。因此，提高孩子们的元语言技能也可能有助于中文阅读。在本研究中，我们测试了在8周内训练孩子们的元语言技能或训练他们的工作记忆能力是否会提高阅读水平，以及这些提高在中文和英文中是否相似。我们招募了35名香港二年级学生，并将他们随机分为元语言训练组（n = 13）、工作记忆训练组（10名）或候补对照组（12名）。在元语言训练中，教孩子们将新的汉字分析为声旁和形旁，将新的英语单词分析为起始音和韵脚。在工作记忆训练中，训练孩子们按正确或相反顺序回忆越来越长的粤语或英语音节串。所有孩子在训练前后都接受了中文和英文的语音技能、言语工作记忆和单词阅读流畅性测试。对测试前和测试后数据的分析表明，只有元语言训练组在中文和英文的语音技能上有显著提高，而其他两组没有。与其他两组相比，工作记忆训练组中文和英文的工作记忆广度从测试前到测试后有所增加。尽管有这些特定领域的训练效果，但与对照组相比，两个训练组在中文和英文的单词阅读流畅性方面的提高相似。我们的研究结果表明，提高元语言技能和扩大工作记忆广度对阅读流畅性似乎同样有益，而且这些效果在中文和英文中相似。
