Statistical learning of Chinese orthography in Hong Kong dyslexic children

Abstract

In this study, as an extension to previous pilot study, visual non-linguistic and linguistic statistical learning of children with dyslexia in Chinese were investigated. In linguistic statistical learning experiments, statistical learning of three orthographic regularities in Chinese, namely positional, phonetic and semantic regularities, were examined. Three groups of children: (1) 25 children with dyslexia in Chinese from Primary two (mean age= 7;8), (2) 25 chronological-age-matched controls from Primary two (mean age= 7;7), and (3) 25 reading-level matched controls from Primary one (mean age= 6;9), participated in the study. Children with dyslexia showed significant impairment in both non-linguistic statistical learning and linguistic statistical learning, specifically on learning of phonetic regularities, compared with chronological-age matched controls. This is in line with the hypothesis that statistical learning is one of the mechanisms in Chinese orthography learning and impaired statistical learning in phonetic regularities is related to impairment in reading ability in early primary grades.