Gender differences of reading ability in Chinese children

Abstract

Generally, females are regarded as the group who has better verbal and reading abilities (Maccoby & Jacklin, 1974; Denno, 1982), although there are still some disagreements on particular aspects or language systems (Hyde & Linn, 1988; Hetherington & Parke, 1986). We asked whether gender differences of reading ability exist in Chinese children and if so, how the difference may be demonstrated. In addition, we investigated whether the development of reading ability follows a hierarchical model (Gough &Hillinger, 1980; Ehri, 1980; Ehri & Wilce, 1985), according to which, the gender differences may vary with age and reading experience. We tested children’s character reading ability and phonological awareness in a Shandong primary school. Fifty-five second graders and forty-three fourth graders performed behavioral tasks containing a Chinese character reading test, a Chinese onset-rime oddity test and an English onset-rime oddity test. We found that Chinese children exhibited a significant gender difference in Chinese character reading ability. However, we have not found gender differences on onset-rime level phonological awareness. Thus, gender differences of reading ability exist in Chinese children, even if the differences only cover partial phonological or orthographic skills. The present data have also yielded the predicted result that the development of gender differences change with age and reading experience. Specifically, the gender difference on Chinese character reading ability emerged after Grade 2. In terms of the onset-rime oddity task, the performances of boys and girls showed no striking difference at any grades. These results reveal that gender differences of reading ability exist in Chinese children, especially in children in higher grades (Grade 4). Different types of verbal skills and learning attitude should be taken into account, and be examined in the future.