Abstract
Mastering writing is one of the important goals in the development of children’s written language, influenced by many reading related skills. Dictation and copying, representing accuracy and fluency in writing respectively, become the important indicators of the writing ability. Although the important role of writing has been unanimously recognized by researchers, the roles of dictation and copying have been underrated for years. Whether dictation or copying was difficult for children, and understanding the factors that influence dictation and copying is crucial to improve writing skills. Different from the alphabetic writing, Chinese characters are unique ideograph. There are a large number of homophones and polysemous characters in Chinese and the irregular grapheme-phoneme correspondence makes children rely more on semantic clues, rather than phonetic clues. Both alphabetic characters and Chinese horizontal researches have shown that children could benefit from morpheme analysis of words in dictation. Thus, it is reasonable to infer that morphological awareness may affect Chinese character dictation. In addition, rapid automatized naming also plays an important role in dictation, but the results of rapid automatized naming on dictation are not consistent. Compared with dictation, copying has received relatively little attention. At present, it is not clear whether morphological awareness and rapid automatized naming have any influence on Chinese characters copying. Furthermore, in order to explore the time effect of morphological awareness and rapid automatized naming on Chinese character dictation and copying, a longitudinal design was adopted, so as to probe more clearly whether there are same predictive effects in the course of time development.
The two-year longitudinal study was conducted to explore the effect of morphological awareness and rapid automatized naming on Chinese character dictation and copying over time. Participants included 127 students living in mainland China, who were tracked from fifth to sixth grade, and were administered a comprehensive battery of tests including assessments for non-verbal IQ, phonological awareness, morphological awareness (e.g. homophone awareness, compounding awareness), rapid automatized naming, and dictation and copying of Chinese characters. The direct model was used to determine the contribution of morphological awareness and rapid automatized naming on dictation and copying from grade 5 to 6 by using the structural equation model.
After controlling for non-verbal IQ, phonological awareness and the autoregressive effect, the results of model showed that: (1) children’s dictation and copying of Chinese characters have significantly increased over time; (2) morphological awareness in grade 5 significantly predicted the dictation at two time points, while rapid automatized naming in grade 5 only significantly predicted the current dictation in grade 5; (3) both morphological awareness in grade 5 and rapid automatized naming in grade 5 only predict current copying, but had no significant predictive effect on the copying after one year. These findings indicated there is different effects of morphological awareness and rapid automatized naming on Chinese character dictation and copying. This indicates writing accuracy (dictation) should not be unilaterally emphasized when teaching children new vocabulary, but attention should also be given to the cultivation of writing fluency (copying) in daily practice teaching and training.
Key words
morphological awareness /
rapid automatized naming /
Chinese character dictation /
copying
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Yuan Ding.
The Effect of Morphological Awareness and Rapid Automatized Naming on Chinese Character Dictation and Copying[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2021, 44(6): 1297-1304
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