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This dissertation, The Role of Phonological Awareness and Visual-orthographic Skills in Chinese Reading Acquisition by Wai-ting, Siok, 蕭慧婷, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Abstract of thesis entitled 'The Role Of Phonological Awareness And Visual-Orthographic Skills In Chinese Reading Acquisition' submitted by Siok Wai Ting for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong in March 2001 This study examined the role of phonological awareness and visuo- orthographic processing skills in the development of Chinese reading abilities. Research using alphabetic languages has generally shown that phonological awareness, the ability to conceive of spoken words as sequences of smaller units of sound segments, is strongly related to success in reading. In particular, phonological awareness measured at both the onset- rime and the phonemic level relates to alphabetic reading success. Written Chinese has a logographic feature where the characters map onto the morpheme and cannot be pronounced by recourse to grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules. It is likely that the nature of phonological awareness that relates to Chinese reading is different from that of English. The study recruited 154 1st to 5th graders in Beijing. Before they were taught to read Chinese characters, these subjects had learned an alphabetic script known as Hanyu Pinyin, which helps the association of a visual character form and its pronunciation in later reading acquisition. Children's performance on tests of various cognitive skills, reading ability and pinyin knowledge were examined. Specifically, phonological awareness was assessed by 4 tasks that varied in linguistic complexity (onset-rime, tonal and phonemic level) to ascertain which level of phonological units best predicts Chinese reading. These subjects were tested again one year later on measures of reading ability and pinyin knowledge to discover the longitudinal relationship of these measures with the various cognitive skills. Results using the hierarchical multiple regression and the structural equation approach showed that (1) visual skills predicted reading success at lower grades, (2) pinyin knowledge and the ability to discriminate homophonic characters were longitudinally predictive of later reading success, (3) onset-rime awareness, but not phonemic awareness, predicted Chinese reading, and (4) there was a reciprocal relationship between pinyin knowledge and reading success. These findings suggest that learning to read Chinese progresses from a logographic phase to an orthographic- phonological phase and that the nature of phonological awareness predicting reading success is contingent on the characteristics of the writing system. Moreover, this study has demonstrated the importance and effectiveness of the adoption of pinyin as a learning tool from a psychological perspective. These findings have important implications for education in Hong Kong, where no phonetic script is adopted to aid Chinese reading, unlike reading acquisition in Taiwan or Mainland China. Learning to read Chinese in Hong Kong is painstaking, which involves tremendous amount of rote memory and writing exercises, and children have difficulties in reading Chinese texts at home as there is no guidance on how to pronounce unfamiliar Chinese characters. Without teacher's or parents' help, Hong Kong children do not know the sounds of newly encountered characters, unlike Mainland children who can read with the help of pinyin. This casts doubts on the effectiveness of using Chinese as the instruction medium in Ho

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