Early Childhood Research Quarterly 32 (2015) 5159

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Early Childhood Research Quarterly

Unique predictors of early reading and writing: A one-year

longitudinal study of Chinese kindergarteners
Ying Wang a , Li Yin b, , Catherine McBride a
a
b

Department of Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China

Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Center for the Study of Language and Psychology, Tsinghua University, China

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 16 August 2014
Received in revised form 13 February 2015
Accepted 23 February 2015
Available online 3 March 2015
Keywords:
Early Chinese literacy development
Semantic radical awareness
RAN
Vocabulary knowledge
Visual-orthographic copying skill
Visual-motor skill

a b s t r a c t
Childrens early literacy development is a key contributor to later literacy skills and overall academic
achievement. Because of the unique features of Chinese characters, it may be that predictors of literacy acquisition differ developmentally for reading and writing. In this study, we examined longitudinal
predictors of reading and writing for 73 Chinese kindergarteners when they were 5; 2 (year; month)
(range = 4; 96; 2). Word reading and writing were not signicantly correlated at time 1 (T1), but were
signicantly associated with one another one year later (T2). At T1, the unique correlates of word reading were semantic radical awareness, rapid automatized naming, and vocabulary, whereas the only
unique correlate of word writing was visual-orthographic copying skill. Semantic radical awareness at
T1 uniquely predicted both word reading and word writing at T2, with age, nonverbal reasoning, and T1
performance statistically controlled. These results suggest that reading and writing differ in unique correlates in the beginning but change rapidly with development. Findings also shed light on the importance
of semantic radical awareness in early literacy development in Chinese.
2015 Published by Elsevier Inc.

Early reading and writing skills among preschoolers and kindergarteners are important and strong precursors of childrens later
literacy skills and school achievement (National Institute of Child
Health and Human Development, 2000; Whitehurst & Lonigan,
2001). Identifying the predictors of childrens early literacy skills
can help early childhood educators to understand what knowledge
and skills should be emphasized in promoting reading and writing at different learning stages. For example, if a given cognitive
linguistic skill that can be tested early in development is a strong
predictor of subsequent word reading or word writing, it can be
used for early identication of those at-risk for literacy difculties. In addition, sometimes helping a child to practice such a skill
helps to facilitate subsequent literacy abilities in young children. A
familiar example is the fact that teaching the ABC song and corresponding letter names (and sounds) helps those learning to read
the Roman alphabet to read relatively efciently.
Childrens early literacy development is inuenced by a number
of cognitive developmental skills, including phonological awareness, morphological awareness and speed of processing (Chow,
McBride-Chang, & Burgess, 2005; Lei et al., 2011; McBride-Chang,

Corresponding author at: Wen Nan Building, Room 103, Tsinghua University,
Haidian District, 100084 Beijing, China. Tel.: +86 13801089752.
E-mail address: yinl@tsinghua.edu.cn (L. Yin).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2015.02.004
0885-2006/ 2015 Published by Elsevier Inc.

Liu, Wong, Wong, & Shu, 2011; Shu, Peng, & McBride-Chang,
2008; Tong, McBride-Chang, Shu, & Wong, 2009). These skills are
important across readers of various languages (Casalis & LouisAlexander, 2000; Cho, McBride-Chang, & Park, 2008; Deacon &
Kirby, 2004; Nikolopoulos, Goulandris, Hulme, & Snowling, 2006;
Patel, Snowling, & de Jong, 2004).
Given that about one fth of the population of the planet
speaks Chinese as a native language as well as the increasing
importance of Chinese as a global language for education and
business, understanding Chinese literacy acquisition has become
increasingly important. Reading and writing Chinese characters
may require some unique skills different from those used in alphabetic languages (Chung & McBride-Chang, 2011; Tan, Spinks, Eden,
Perfetti, & Siok, 2005). For example, identication of letter names is
less crucial than is understanding of the components, particularly
radicals, of Chinese characters. Also, to date, much more is known
about word reading than word writing in Chinese. To ll in this gap,
the present study sought to investigate which particular skills, both
universal and unique, would best explain young Mainland Chinese
childrens performance in both reading and writing, concurrently
and longitudinally.
The Chinese writing system is unique in its representation of
sound and meaning. Each Chinese character represents both a syllable and a morpheme rather than a phoneme (DeFrancis, 1989;
McBride-Chang & Kail, 2002). In addition, Chinese appears to be

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Y. Wang et al. / Early Childhood Research Quarterly 32 (2015) 5159

particularly visually complex. A character consists of a conguration of strokes. The majority of the 2570 characters taught in
primary school in Mainland China have 712 strokes; some have
more than 20 strokes (Shu, Chen, Anderson, Wu, & Xuan, 2003).
About 82% of modern Chinese characters are compound characters
that consist of a semantic radical and a phonetic radical. Radicals
are stroke patterns that recur across characters. The semantic radical gives some clue to the characters meaning, and the phonetic
radical gives some clue to the characters pronunciation. Left-right
and top-down structures are the two major types of structure of
characters. In a leftright structure character the semantic radical
usually appears on the left and the phonetic radical falls on the
right, whereas in a topbottom structure character, the semantic
radical usually appears at the top and the phonetic radical usually
appears at the bottom.
For Chinese word reading, previous studies have highlighted
several correlates including morphological awareness (Li, Shu,
McBride-Chang, Liu, & Peng, 2012; McBride-Chang, Shu, Zhou, Wat,
& Wagner, 2003; Pan et al., 2011; Tong et al., 2009), rapid automatized naming (RAN), phonological awareness (Li, Peng, & Shu, 2006;
McBride-Chang & Ho, 2005; McBride-Chang, Bialystok, Chong, &
Li, 2004; Shu et al., 2008; Siok & Fletcher, 2001), and vocabulary
knowledge (Pan et al., 2011; Shu, McBride-Chang, Wu, & Liu, 2006).
More than 70% of Chinese words are compounds that consist of two
or more morphemes (Institute of Language Teaching and Research
[of China], 1986). Even at the early stage of Chinese learning, children may recognize these patterns in compound words. Thus, as
an aspect of Chinese morphological awareness, lexical compound
awareness can be important for childrens beginning learning.
RAN is usually assessed by very simple tasks where children name
aloud symbols (letters or numbers), objects or colors as quickly as
they can. RAN has been hypothesized to reect at least partly the
arbitrary mappings between orthography and phonology (Manis,
Seidenberg, & Doi, 1999). Given that Chinese is a deep orthography
in which sound symbol correspondences are relatively opaque,
as described earlier, RAN skills should presumably be important
for reading in Chinese early on. Chinese reading is a process of
mapping syllables to characters. Thus, syllable awareness as a level
of phonological awareness should be particularly important in
Chinese reading. Vocabulary knowledge, as a measure of general
language skills, has been found to be a unique developmental
predictor for all Chinese literacy skills as well (Pan et al., 2011).
In addition to the above-mentioned established cognitive and
linguistic skills that are found to relate to Chinese word reading, a
novel task was included in the present study to examine the correlates of early Chinese literacy, namely, semantic radical awareness
(Lam & McBride-Chang, 2013). Semantic radical awareness refers
to the sensitivity to morphemic structure of Chinese characters (Li,
Anderson, Nagy, & Zhang, 2002; Shu & Anderson, 1997). For example, is the semantic radical (meaning wood) in the compound
character (meaning pine). An early attempt to specify the role
of semantic radical awareness in Chinese childrens literacy acquisition was made by Shu and Anderson (1997). They found that
primary school children were aware of the relationship between
semantic radical and character meaning. Additionally, semantic
radical knowledge was found to be necessary for reading skill. Shu
(2003) reported that primary-school-aged children could recognize the subcomponents of a given character before memorizing
the whole character. Semantic radical knowledge depends on ones
learning experience. The present study further examined the role of
semantic radical awareness in younger childrens concurrent and
subsequent Chinese literacy development.
For Chinese word writing, correlates are less clear compared
with Chinese word reading. In models of word reading and word
writing in alphabetic orthographies, some (Bradley & Bryant,
1979; Goswami & Bryant, 1990) have proposed that there is a

discrepancy and a separation between childrens reading and

spelling in early development. Reading is often a poor predictor of
spelling in young children, though spelling tends to explain reading (Bosman & Van Orden, 1997; Caravolas, Hulme, & Snowling,
2001). However, there are strong correlations between reading
and spelling over time in alphabetic orthographies (Ehri, 1997).
To what extent are early reading and writing processes in Chinese
separable or overlapping? And how do early cognitive and linguistic skills contribute to reading and writing in the early childhood
years? The most recent ndings from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten (ECLS-K) and the National Assessment
of Education Progress (NAEP) highlight the need for understanding
writing development and developing writing interventions for both
young children and disabled learners (Miller & McCardle, 2011).
Chinese writing is, to the beginner, a process of converting
oral language to seemingly arbitrary visual forms without clear
phonological cues. Learners should write each stroke according to
the congurations of the characters. Such writing is complicated
because stroke order is inexible but nonintuitive to beginning
learners; thus, much of writing mastery involves internalizing the
visual-motor aspects of this writing (Kao, 2006).
Tan et al. (2005) asserted that copying of Chinese characters might facilitate childrens internalization of the visualorthographic aspects of Chinese writing. Additionally, visual-motor
integration can improve the formation of long-term motor memory
of Chinese characters. By repeatedly copying, children may gradually attend to stroke order, which is essential for expert word
representation in Chinese (Flores dArcais, 1994; Yeung, Ho, Chan,
& Chung, 2013). Thus, copying practice might help children develop
better spontaneous writing of correct forms of Chinese characters.
Indeed, parents and educators typically emphasize rote learning of
Chinese characters as the best way for children to learn to read and
write in the initial learning stage (Li & Rao, 2005; Packard et al.,
2006; Wu, Li, & Anderson, 1999).
Ziegler and Goswami (2005) talked about an inverse progression
of orthographic and phonological development in their psycholinguistic grain size theory. Chinese writing and reading stage models
also capture this progression from small-to-large and large-tosmall unit sizes. Children learn whole characters when they begin
to read in Chinese; gradually they come to understand the function of smaller radicals within characters to help them read new
characters (Ho, Yau, & Au, 2003; Shu, 2003). Chinese childrens writing units evolve from strokes to larger units of strokes (radicals)
and logographemes (the whole characters) (Shi, Li, Zhang, & Shu,
2011). Thus, copying skill, which can facilitate childrens memory
for strokes and implicit knowledge of character structure, might
be particularly important for acquiring writing in an early learning
stage. Wang, McBride-Chang, and Chan (2013) found that copying
skill was associated with word writing in Chinese kindergarteners.
In the present study, we moved further to look at the association of
word reading with writing, as well as the specic correlates of each,
in Mainland Chinese kindergarteners. We included semantic radical awareness, which was not included in previous investigations,
and copying skills.
We considered two types of copying skills that might be
important for childrens early writing skill. One is pure copying of unfamiliar two-dimensional print of which children have
no prior cognitive or orthographic experience or knowledge. This
pure copying skill captures relatively pure integrated visual-motor
skills relevant to Chinese writing and distinguished dyslexic and
nondyslexic Hong Kong Chinese children in one study (McBrideChang, Chung, &Tong, 2011). The other, visual-orthographic
copying skill, combines visual-motor skill with visual-orthographic
knowledge. Visual-orthographic knowledge in Chinese typically
implies knowledge of the positions, structuring, and functions of
the radicals within Chinese characters (McBride-Chang, Chung,

Y. Wang et al. / Early Childhood Research Quarterly 32 (2015) 5159

et al., 2011). One of the best methods for tapping this skill is via
a task of delayed copying (Anderson et al., 2013).
To summarize, in the present study, we investigated the early
development of both word reading and word writing in Chinese
young children. We focused on two developmental questions. First,
what are the unique cognitive and linguistic correlates of word
reading and word writing, respectively, in Chinese young children?
Second, how are these correlates related to subsequent reading and
writing one year later? Answers to these questions will provide
important evidence for the cognitive and linguistic skills needed
for early literacy development and will shed light on facilitative instructional approaches for typically developing children and
alternative teaching means for children with reading and/or writing
difculties.

Method
Participants
Participants were 73 native Chinese-speaking children (39 girls)
from a public kindergarten in a middle-class area of Beijing, China;
they completed all testing at both time 1 (T1) and a year later, at
time 2 (T2). The mean age of the children at T1 was 5; 2 (year;
month) (range = 4; 96; 2). In Mainland China, kindergarten normally lasts 3 years (K1, K2, and K3) beginning around age three and
ends around age six. Formal literacy instruction is not provided
until the children start primary school (Li & Rao, 2000). The kindergarten where the present study was conducted has eight classes in
each grade. The children who participated in the present study were
randomly selected from four classes of K2 and K3, respectively.
Signed written parental consent was obtained from all participants.
Originally at T1, 85 children were selected and completed T1 testing, but at T2, seven children had moved to other districts of the city
for family reasons and were inaccessible, and ve children were ill
during testing. Among the 73 children in the nal sample, 42 were
from K2 and 31 were from K3. According to the home literacy questionnaires and the teacher reports completed prior to the study,
all participating children were typically developing monolingual
Mandarin Chinese speakers and no child had known developmental, speech, language, or behavior problems. All children were from
middle-income families. The average level of mother education was
17.4 years (with 16 years being equivalent to a college degree).
Procedure
At T1, children received Chinese word reading and word writing tests and a battery of cognitive-linguistic tasks described below.
Except for the delayed copying and pure copying tasks which were
tested in a group format, all other tasks were administered individually. Testing typically lasted 20 min per session across three
sessions and the order of tasks was randomized across children.
At T2, children received Chinese word reading and word writing
again. All testing instructions were given in Mandarin Chinese by
trained graduate students of psychology or linguistics majors.
Measures
Nonverbal IQ
Ravens Standard Progressive Matrices (Raven, Court, & Raven,
1996) is a multiple-choice measure used to test childrens nonverbal intelligence. At T1, Sets A and B were administered to
measure young childrens nonverbal reasoning ability. For each of
the 24 items, children were asked to identify the missing element
that completed a pattern from among six choices. The maximum

53

score was 24 points and the internal consistency reliability for this
task was .79.
Chinese word reading
At both T1 and T2, a Chinese word recognition task was used to
examine childrens early reading ability. In this task, children were
required to read 50 Chinese single-character words aloud one by
one, and the characters were arranged according to approximate
difculty level. This task has been successfully used for this age
range of children from Mainland China in the past research (Lin
et al., 2010). One point was given per word and the maximum score
was 50 points. The internal consistency reliability for this task was
.98 at T1 and .92 at T2.
Chinese word writing
At both T1 and T2, a Chinese word dictation task was administered to assess childrens writing skills (Wang et al., 2013). Children
were asked to write 10 orally familiar words (three single-character
words and seven two-character words) selected from common
story books in kindergarten and standard textbooks in primary
schools. In order to avoid confusion across Chinese homophones in
single-character words, the experimenter offered compound words
consisting of the target single-character words for childrens reference. For example, children were asked to write the character
(meaning cloud) as in the word (meaning white cloud).
One point was given for a correctly written character and the total
score for this task was 17 points. The internal consistency reliability
for this task was .77 at T1 and .84 at T2.
Semantic radical awareness
At T1, a semantic radical selection task was administered to
test childrens semantic radical awareness. This task consisted of
15 semantic-radical items which were transparent in meaning; for
example, always represents animals. For each item, children
were asked to choose the best one out of four pictures that matched
the meaning of the target semantic radical. This task has been used
in previous research of Hong Kong children in this age range (Lam &
McBride-Chang, 2013). One point was given for each correct answer
and the maximum possible score was 15. The internal consistency
reliability for this task was .70.
Visual-motor skill
At T1, we administered two copying tasks of unfamiliar scripts,
including Korean and Hebrew words, to measure childrens visualmotor skill. Both of them were time-limited tasks, with children
allotted 5 min to nish each task (McBride-Chang, Chung, et al.,
2011). For Korean copying, children were asked to copy ve Korean
words arranged according to levels of visual difculty on an answer
sheet. Each Korean word consisted of three segments, and the scoring criteria included both the shape and position of each segment
across a 3-point (02) scale. Zero (0) points were given for an incorrect shape or the shape in an incorrect position. One (1) point was
given for a similar shape or the shape in a position close to the correct location, and two (2) points were awarded for a correct shape
and the shape in the correct position. For Hebrew copying, children
were required to copy ve Hebrew words and each Hebrew word
consisted of three to six segments. The coding system for the shape
of each segment, sequence, and alignment of all segments within
a word was scored on a 2-point (01) scale. Zero (0) points were
given when children wrote an incorrect shape or produced the components in incorrect sequence, or created an incorrect alignment
across components. One (1) point was given when children wrote
a correct shape of the component, put the components in a correct
sequence of components, and made all the components in a correct alignment. Both copying tasks were designed to tap copying of
a sort the children had never done before because all stimuli were

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Y. Wang et al. / Early Childhood Research Quarterly 32 (2015) 5159

completely unfamiliar; items were scored by research assistants

unfamiliar with these scripts at all. Therefore, although the items
that were copied were actually real Korean and Hebrew words,
they were treated as relatively pure visual-motor skills items. The
maximum possible score was 60 and 30 for Korean copying (with
each word having a total possible score of 12) and Hebrew copying,
respectively. Two Chinese research assistants with a degree in psychology scored the two copying tasks; neither had any knowledge
of Korean or Hebrew scripts. The inter-rater reliability was .97 and
.98 for Korean copying and Hebrew copying, respectively.

Visual-orthographic copying skill

At T1, we administered a delayed copying task to measure childrens visual-orthographic copying skill. The task consisted of ve
unfamiliar Chinese characters ranked according to increasing difculty level. Each visual character was displayed for two seconds
and then removed from view; children were then asked to write
down the whole character from memory (Anderson et al., 2013;
Pak et al., 2005). The time limit for each character was 1 min. Scores
were given according to the accuracy and integration of each character across a 4-point (03) scale. The maximum score of three
points was awarded when children wrote the correct character;
two points were given when more than one components within the
character could be identied; one point was given when only one
component could be identied. Zero points were allotted when no
Chinese character could be identied. Two Chinese research assistants with a degree in psychology scored the task. The maximum
possible score for this task was 15 and the inter-rater reliability was
.92.

RAN for numbers

At T1, we tested RAN for numbers rather than colors or other
measures because RAN for numbers is a particularly strong correlate for literacy development in Chinese children (Liao, Georgiou,
& Parrila, 2008). Children were asked to read aloud ve single-digit
numbers (5, 3, 1, 4, 8) placed in ve rows and randomly ordered by
row as quickly as possible. Children were rst required to name the
ve numbers individually without being timed to ensure that most
of them knew the names of the ve numbers. Children were then
encouraged to read aloud the 25 digits from top to bottom, from
left to right, and the experimenter recorded the total time taken
for this. The task was administered twice and the average of the
two scores was used to represent a nal naming speed measure
(McBride-Chang et al., 2008). The test-retest reliability for this task
was .81.

Vocabulary knowledge
At T1, a vocabulary denitions task adapted from the StanfordBinet Intelligence Scale vocabulary subtest (Thorndike, Hagen, &
Sattler, 1986) was used to measure Mandarin Chinese-speaking
childrens expressive vocabulary knowledge. Thirty-two vocabulary words ranked according to increasing difculty levels were
presented, and children were asked to provide oral denitions of
the Chinese words presented by the experimenter. The answers
were scored as either 0, 1 or 2 by referring to a standardized
marking scheme. Two points were given for a synonym or a clear
description of the target word; one point was given for an ambiguous answer or an example given to describe the target word; and
no points were given for repetition of the target word or a wrong
description. Testing stopped when the children failed to give the
correct answer across ve consecutive words. The maximum possible score was 64. The internal consistency reliability for this task
was .95.

Morphological awareness
At T1, a morphological construction task was used to measure
childrens morphological awareness. The task has been successfully
used in previous studies in Mainland China (Lei et al., 2011; Liu &
McBride-Chang, 2010). In this task, children were asked to come up
with labels for 27 new objects or concepts by combining familiar
morphemes using conventional language structure. For example,
(There is one type of oil made using

,
peanuts; we call it peanut oil);
,
? (What
would we call a type of oil that is made using mushrooms? The correct answer would be mushroom oil). One point was given for each
correct item, and the total score was 27. The internal consistency
reliability for this task was .85.
Phonological awareness
At T1, a syllable deletion task was used to test childrens phonological awareness. Twelve three-syllable Mandarin phrases were
orally presented by an experimenter, and the children were asked
to delete one of the syllables in each phrase and then to say the
new phrase following this deletion (Shu et al., 2008). One point
was given for a correct answer. The maximum possible score for
this task was 12 and the internal consistency reliability was .87.
Results
Reliabilities for all tasks were reasonable, all at or above .70. The
means, standard deviations, and ranges for all variables separately
for T1 and T2 are displayed in Table 1. At T1, children had relatively
low scores on word reading, writing and visual-orthographic copying tasks. The means of these three tasks were all below one third
of the total score of each task.
Table 2 shows all correlations among included variables at
T1 and T2 separately. After statistically controlling age and IQ,
word reading and writing were not signicantly correlated at
T1; however, at T2, reading and writing became moderately and
signicantly associated with one another. Chinese reading was signicantly correlated with semantic radical awareness, RAN, and
vocabulary knowledge across T1 and T2. In addition, at both T1
and T2, Chinese writing was signicantly correlated with visualorthographic copying skill, but Chinese reading was not. At T1,
both visual-orthographic copying and visual-motor skill tasks were
signicantly and moderately associated with Chinese writing,
whereas after twelve months, only visual-orthographic copying
was signicantly associated with Chinese writing. In contrast, signicant correlates of Chinese reading at T1 were semantic radical
awareness, RAN and vocabulary knowledge only, and at T2, were
semantic radical awareness, RAN, vocabulary knowledge, morphological awareness, and phonological awareness.
To examine the unique correlates of reading and writing, we
conducted stepwise regression analyses separately for word reading and word writing at T1, with all signicant correlates from
Table 2 included. Because we sought to understand unique correlates of word reading and writing, we statistically controlled each in
the analyses for explaining the other (i.e., word writing was statistically controlled when word reading was the dependent variable,
and vice versa).
For T1 word reading, because age and IQ were signicantly associated with word reading, we rst controlled age, IQ, and T1 word
writing, and then used stepwise analysis to nd out the unique correlates of T1 word reading. As indicated in Table 3, with age, IQ, and
T1 writing skill statistically controlled, semantic radical awareness,
RAN, and vocabulary knowledge explained 15%, 6%, and 3% unique
variance in Chinese reading, respectively.
For T1 word writing, similarly, we rst controlled age, IQ, and T1
word reading, and then used stepwise analysis to nd the unique

Y. Wang et al. / Early Childhood Research Quarterly 32 (2015) 5159

55

Table 1
Means, standard deviations and ranges for all variables at time 1 and time 2.
Variable

Time 1 (N = 85)

Time 2 (N = 73)

M (SD)
Age
IQ (Nonverbal IQ)
Chinese reading
Chinese writing
RAN
Vocabulary knowledge
Semantic radical awareness
Morphological awareness
Syllable deletion
Visual-orthographic copying
Korean copying
Hebrew copying

Range

61.58 (6.07)
13.35 (3.98)
13.08 (12.91)
4.76 (3.21)
20.33 (7.08)
15.36 (8.08)
9.24 (3.05)
18.05 (4.63)
8.45 (3.30)
4.48 (3.43)
50.18 (10.33)
23.34 (6.61)

M (SD)

4974
424
045
016
7.2645.55
036
115
024
012
015
1260
030

Range

21.01 (13.21)
6.55 (3.30)

046
116

Note: Only Chinese word reading and word writing were tested at both time 1 and time 2, and other measures were only administered at time 1.

Table 2
Pearson correlations among all variables at time 1 (across) and time 2 (down) after controlling for age and IQ.

Chinese reading (CR)

Chinese writing (CW)
RAN
Vocabulary knowledge (VK)
Semantic radical awareness (SA)
Morphological awareness (MA)
Syllable deletion (SD)
Visual-orthographic copying (VoC)
Korean copying (KC)
Hebrew copying (HC)
Pure visual-motor factor (PVF)
*
**

CR

CW

RAN

VK

SA

MA

SD

VoC

KC

HC

PVF

.20

.23
.29*
.34**
.29*
.24*
.39**
.23
.15
.20

.43**
.10

.39**
.15
.21

.48**
.16
.50**
.20

.23
.18
.38**
.18
.38**

.22
.14
.43**
.03
.34**
.65**

.19
.54**
.25*
.10
.30*
.18
.22

.13
.34**
.32**
.04
.20
.31**
.34**
.31**

.13
.30*
.24*
.09
.17
.34**
.38**
.25*
.70**

.14
.35**
.30*
.03
.20
.35**
.39**
.30*
.92**
.93**

.61**
.47**
.29*
.57**
.28*
.26*
.22
.23
.15
.20

p < .05.
p < .01.

correlates of T1 word writing. Given that the two copying tasks

of Korean and Hebrew were intended to measure relatively pure
visual-motor skill and that they were relatively highly associated,
an exploratory factor analysis was performed rst on these two
tasks. The results showed that only one factor with Eigen value > 1.0
( = 1.782) emerged from this analysis, and it explained about 89%
of the variance in the two copying tasks. Moreover, the communalities of the variables in this analysis were all above 0.8. Therefore, we
extracted this one common factor underlying copying skill, which
was signicantly associated with childrens T1 word writing (see
Table 2), and used the factor score to represent pure visual-motor
skill in subsequent stepwise analysis. As indicated in Table 4, with
age, IQ, and T1 reading skill statistically controlled, only visualorthographic copying explained 20% of unique variance in T1 word
writing.
We then examined the longitudinal predictors of T2 word reading and word writing. For T2 word reading, we rst controlled
Table 3
Multiple stepwise regression explaining childrens Chinese reading at time 1 with
childrens nonverbal IQ, age and time 1 writing skill controlled.
Block and variables
Block 1
Age
IQ
T1 writing skill
Block 2
Semantic radical awareness
Block 3
Vocabulary knowledge
Block 4
RAN
*
**

p < .05.
p < .01.

R2

R2 change

SE B

.23

.23**

.28

.23

.13

.31

.43

.08

.38

**

.15

1.28

.47

.30

.44

.06**

.37

.14

.23*

.47

.03*

.46

.20

.26*

**

age, IQ, and T1 word reading, and then used stepwise analysis to
nd out the unique correlates of T2 word reading. As indicated in
Table 5, with age, IQ and T1 reading skill statistically controlled,
only semantic radical awareness contributed 3% unique variance
in T2 word reading. Similarly, for T2 word writing, as indicated in
Table 6, with age, IQ, and T1 writing skill statistically controlled,
only semantic radical awareness contributed 4% unique variance
in T2 word writing.
Discussion
Given the importance of early literacy development for all
school learning, we explored early indicators of word reading and
word writing skills in young Chinese children in the present study.
Our study examined the unique correlates of word reading and
writing in 46-year-old Chinese children and their relationship
with subsequent reading and writing ability one year later.
We found that, initially, word reading and writing in Chinese
were not strongly related. However, these skills became moderately and signicantly associated with one another one year
later. The two skills were, thus, surprisingly separate in early
Table 4
Multiple stepwise regression explaining childrens Chinese writing at time 1 with
childrens nonverbal IQ, age and time 1 reading skill controlled.
Block and variables
Block 1
Age
IQ
T1 reading skill
Block 2
Visual-orthographic copying
**

p < .01.

R2

R2 change

SE B

.39

.39**

.15
.06
.02

.04
.07
.02

.29**
.07
.08

.59

.20**

.55

.09

.58**

56

Y. Wang et al. / Early Childhood Research Quarterly 32 (2015) 5159

Table 5
Multiple stepwise regression explaining childrens Chinese reading at time 2 with
childrens nonverbal IQ, age and time 1 reading skill controlled.
Block and variables
Block 1
Age
IQ
T1 reading skill
Block 2
Semantic radical awareness
*
**

R2

R2 change

SE B

.76

.76**

.36
.32
.63

.15
.22
.07

.16*
.09
.64**

.79

.03**

.96

.30

.22**

p < .05.
p < .01.

development, but became related to each other in later development. At T1, children appeared to make use of different cognitivelinguistic skills in learning to read and write. The unique correlates
of word reading were semantic radical awareness, RAN, and vocabulary with age, nonverbal reasoning, and word writing statistically
controlled, whereas the only unique correlate of Chinese word
writing was visual-orthographic copying skill with age, nonverbal
reasoning and word reading statistically controlling. Semantic radical awareness was a signicant longitudinal predictor for both word
reading and writing in Chinese with age, nonverbal reasoning, and
T1 performance statistically controlled. These ndings suggest that
Chinese word reading and writing differ in unique correlates in the
early years, but semantic radical awareness was a signicant and
longitudinal predictor of both reading and writing skills.
Unique correlates of word reading and writing
In early literacy, reading is dened as word recognition, involving recognition memory; writing requires the production of words
to be read. In the present study, writing skills were not correlated
with reading skills at T1, with age and nonverbal reasoning statistically controlled. We found unique and non-overlapping correlates
of reading even beyond writing, and vice versa. The results showed
that young Chinese children at the initial stage of literacy learning
appear to make use of different skills in learning to read and write.
This was consistent with the nding of an early separation between
childrens reading and spelling in English (Bradley & Bryant, 1979;
Goswami & Bryant, 1990). There are two possible explanations
for the discrepancy we found between early reading and writing
in Chinese in the present study. First, at the general level, young
children have little learning experience and limited literacy knowledge. They may not transfer important cognitive and linguistic skills
across tasks in the learning process in the early stage. Second, at
the specic level, Chinese is morphosyllabic in nature and features
high visual complexity. Consequently, learning to read and write in
Chinese may need more efforts in the beginning than learning to
read and write in alphabetic languages, making cross-task transfer
of resources even harder. This is evidenced by the non-overlapping
unique correlates of Chinese word reading and writing at T1, as
detailed below.
Table 6
Multiple stepwise regression explaining childrens Chinese writing at time 2 with
childrens nonverbal IQ, age and time 1 writing skill controlled.
Block and variables
Block 1
Age
IQ
T1 writing skill
Block 2
Semantic radical awareness
*
**

p < .05.
p < .01.

R2

R2 change

SE B

.58

.58**

.12
.10
.50

.06
.07
.10

.21*
.11
.47**

.62

.04*

.24

.09

.22*

For Chinese word reading, vocabulary knowledge, RAN, and

semantic awareness emerged as unique correlates. As shown in
previous work with older Mainland Chinese children (Pan et al.,
2011; Shu et al., 2006), RAN and vocabulary knowledge were
uniquely associated with Chinese word reading. Knowledge of
word meaning (vocabulary knowledge) is particularly helpful for
mappings between visual forms and oral language in childrens
lexical system. RAN taps the arbitrary links of symbols to spoken language, and thus should be especially important for Chinese
reading because of the opaque orthography. More interestingly, we
also found that the newly introduced semantic radical awareness
task was uniquely associated with Chinese word reading at T1. This
meaning-related skill is seldom investigated when exploring early
reading development. The contribution of semantic radical awareness to reading development, even among very young children, is a
novel nding in the area of word reading in Chinese. The knowledge
of semantic radicals, which provide information about a characters
meaning, typically gives a clue to help children to recognize characters. Large groups of Chinese characters share the same semantic
radicals, and they are directly or indirectly related in meaning.
Semantic radical awareness, thus, might enable young children
to remember familiar characters and learn unfamiliar characters.
The strength of its relations with Chinese word reading conrms
the particular role of semantic radical awareness in young childrens early reading development. Comparatively, in alphabetic
languages, letter-name knowledge, phonological awareness, and
RAN have been found to be correlated with beginning reading
skills in both correlational and longitudinal studies (Foulin, 2005;
McBride-Chang et al., 2013; Muter, Hulme, Snowling, & Stevenson,
2004; Pan et al., 2011), and the predictors of reading performance
were relatively universal among alphabetic languages (Ziegler et al.,
2010). Thus, the results of the present study revealed both universal and unique correlates of Chinese and alphabetic word reading
among young children. Specically, RAN was revealed as a unique
correlate of both Chinese and alphabetic word reading, whereas
semantic radical awareness and vocabulary knowledge emerged
as unique correlates of Chinese word reading only.
For Chinese word writing, visual-orthographic copying skill,
focusing on both visual-motor integration and orthographic knowledge, emerged as the only unique correlate. Visual-orthographic
copying skill should be especially more important in learning to
write Chinese in the early stage. In alphabetic languages, words
are formed from a xed set of symbols (typically 2230 letters
of the alphabet), but in Chinese, the majority of the thousands of
characters were formed from over 1290 radicals, which may be further divided into about 648 subcomponents (Fu, 1989). Moreover,
radicals should be positioned properly according to Chinese orthographic rules. Thus, to write a character correctly, young children
not only need to possess proper visual motor skills to integrate
strokes into radicals and then into whole characters, but also need
to know which radicals to use and how to place them legally.
All these skills were tapped simultaneously in the single task of
visual-orthographic copying in our study. In alphabetic writing systems, phonological awareness, RAN, and letter knowledge were the
core component skills underlying spelling development (Caravolas,
2004; Furnes & Samuelsson, 2011; Georgiou, Torppa, Manolitsis,
Lyytinen, & Parrila, 2012; Li, McBride-Chang, Wong, & Shu, 2012).
Contrastingly, the results of the present study demonstrated the
unique role of visual-orthographic copying in Chinese word writing. These results support the idea that copying practice might
facilitate better spontaneous writing skill and provide a memory
aid for reproduction of correct forms of Chinese characters. To some
extent, visual-orthographic copying might best capture the visualorthographic and motor skills involved in Chinese writing activity.
Taken together, Chinese word reading and writing appear to
be relatively separated processes and differ in unique correlates in

Y. Wang et al. / Early Childhood Research Quarterly 32 (2015) 5159

the early years. Semantic radical awareness, RAN, and vocabulary

knowledge tend to be more closely related to childrens early reading skills. Given the morphosyllabic nature of the Chinese writing
system, children might rely more on meaning-related knowledge
when they learn to recognize and memorize new characters. In
contrast, visual-orthographic copying skill emerged as the only signicant correlate of word writing. Visual-orthographic copying skill
likely not only facilitates childrens long-term motor memory for
Chinese characters, but also contributes to overall orthographic
knowledge (Packard et al., 2006; Tan et al., 2005), which further
facilitates writing development (Li et al., 2006; Tong et al., 2009).

Longitudinal predictors of word reading and writing

Finally, word reading and writing became strongly associated
with one another over time, suggesting rapid changes in early
Chinese literacy development. As several studies have suggested,
Chinese writing skills are highly correlated with reading scores in
older children or adults (Pak et al., 2005; Tan et al., 2005), similar
to English (Ehri, 1997). The present study showed moderate and
signicant association between Chinese word reading and writing
at T2.
The other novel contribution of the present study was the
important role of semantic radical awareness in subsequent reading and writing development. As shown in Tables 5 and 6, semantic
radical awareness emerged as a unique correlate of both reading
and writing one year later. The development of semantic radical
awareness, which reects Chinese kindergartners sensitivity to the
formal and functional characteristics of radicals, seems to be very
important to Chinese literacy development. Childrens semantic
radical awareness and Chinese reading and writing might reinforce
each other in the early years. Semantic radical knowledge provides meaning-related cues to assist children in reading and writing
Chinese characters. Those who can read and write some characters may be more likely to notice patterns in semantic radicals;
they can then make use of these radicals to learn more characters.
The results also showed that, beyond word reading and writing,
semantic radical awareness was also associated with RAN, morphological awareness and phonological awareness, which have been
found to be related to Chinese literacy development. Thus, the
ndings suggest that semantic radical awareness could be emphasized in Chinese literacy learning, even during the early childhood
years.

Limitations and directions for future study

There were three major limitations in this study. First, some
of the tasks were relatively difcult for kindergarteners. Because
the children included were beginners in learning Chinese and had
relatively little literacy experience, word reading, writing, and
visual-orthographic copying tasks may have been somewhat difcult for them to complete, especially at T1. Second, the sample
size was relatively small and homogeneous in SES composition
(middle-class) and geographical background (urban). The relatively
small and homogeneous sample might limit the generalizability of
the ndings to a larger population. In future studies, a larger sample with different SES levels and geographical backgrounds may
be needed to further explore the concurrent and longitudinal predictors of early Chinese literacy skills as well as the individual
differences in early Chinese literacy development. Third, it should
be noted that the unique correlates of early Chinese reading and
writing skills were obtained from a design that was correlational
by nature; thus, a causal relationship between these skills awaits
further investigations.

57

Conclusion and implications

The early childhood years are critical for children in acquiring fundamental language and literacy skills. The ndings of the
present study provide evidence for early developmental differences
in the acquisition of reading and writing in Chinese kindergarteners. Theoretically, Chinese word reading and writing development
were broadly consistent with the models of alphabetic orthographies. We found that there is a separation between Chinese reading
and writing in early development and that beginning learners
make use of different skills in learning to read and write in Chinese. However, word reading and writing gradually become closely
related over time. Practically, these ndings suggest that vocabulary knowledge, semantic radical awareness, and visual-motor
related skills are uniquely related to Chinese literacy learning in
the initial stage and thus could be emphasized during early childhood. The longitudinal nature of the present study also underscores
the importance of semantic radical awareness for both reading and
writing development. It suggests that teachers and parents could
draw more childrens attention to semantic radical knowledge in
Chinese, which may facilitate childrens literacy development in
the long term. This longitudinal research sheds light on the theoretical underpinnings of early reading and writing development
and potentially suggests ways to improve early literacy instruction
and early detection of children at risk for reading and/or writing
difculties.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by National Natural Science
Foundation of China Grant (81371497) and Tsinghua University Initiative Scientic Research Program (20121088017). We thank all
participating children, and Sun Yuting and Wei Liwei for their help
in data collection. We also thank the editor and three anonymous
reviewers for very helpful suggestions on an earlier version of this
article.
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