Cross-linguistic Analysis of Developmental Dyslexia─ Does Phonology Matter in Learning to Read Chinese?

Phonological processing deficit has been ascertained to be the core cognitive deficit of developmental dyslexia—in alphabetic languages at least. Measures of phonological processing typically include three components: phonemic awareness, phonological working memory, and rapid automatic naming. Among the three tasks, phonemic awareness was the most powerful predictor of reading abilities. Because the Chinese language has no explicit rules for mapping from the orthographic constituent to the phonological form of a Chinese character, it has been argued that phonological awareness plays no role in reading acquisition in Chinese. We point out that phonological awareness is a metalinguistic understanding that spoken words can be decomposed into functional phonological units and that orthographic-to-phonological mapping in a script is not a necessary condition for determining the effects of phonological awareness on reading acquisition. We contend that orthographic-to-phonological mapping only acts as a secondary processing for representing phonological segments and self-teaching, and that phonetic symbols used in Chinese can fulfill the function of this secondary processing. We present comparisons between Chinese and English that suggest a universal structure for reading and reading acquisition.