Cracking Chinese Orthographic codes: Statistical learning as a key to understanding developmental dyslexia in Chinese

Abstract

Despite the diversity of word-spelling patterns and regularities that exist in different orthographies, it has been commonly reported that orthographic learning, or the process of acquiring word-specific orthographic patterns and general pattern-like orthographic regularities that govern word-specific representations, is fundamentally important to word reading development in Chinese, a non-alphabetic orthography. In this talk, I will report three experiments examining statistical learning of the three key aspects of Chinese orthographic regularities (i.e., positional, phonetic, and semantic regularities) in Chinese children with and without developmental dyslexia. We tested groups of Chinese children (children with dyslexia (mean age 10.8 years), age-matched controls and reading-level matched controls (mean age 8.53 years) in three artificial orthographic learning experiments that assessed learning of positional, phonetic and semantic information of unlearned novel characters. All three groups of children exhibited significant learning of positional regularities, phonetic regularities and semantic regularities of novel characters. Children with dyslexia showed statistical learning that was comparable with age-matched control and reading-level matched children when learning positional and phonetic regularities, but their performance on learning semantic regularities was significantly worse than that of age-matched controls. These findings suggest that statistical learning is a potential mechanism that underlies Chinese orthographic learning, and that children with dyslexia have challenges in some, but not all, statistical learning tasks. In accordance with these findings, we proposed a statistical learning account of orthographic learning that incorporates language-general and language-specific constraints of statistical learning of a novel orthography.