| dc.description.abstract | Previous research showed that literacy acquisition of native readers was affected by phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness. Besides, some other basic cognitive abilities (for example, visual perceptual abilities), or domain genernal abilities (such as statistical learning abilities) played a key role in learning to read, too. However, most of these studies were based on native learners of alphabetic languages. It was unclear whether the correlation could be replicated in learning a second language or learning a non-alphabetic language. In the present study, we conducted four experiments to examine whether the fundamental ability of visual perceptual skills, as well as the ability of detecting regularities in sequential stimuli, would predict the performance of first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) learners in Chinese literacy tests.
A battery of cognitive tests and Chinese literacy tests were administered to 160 elementary students, 63 native college students, and 140 foreigner students whose native languages were alphabetic ones and learned Chinese as L2 in Experiment 1 to 3, respectively. The result showed that the abilities of visual perceptual skills and statistical learning of visual stimuli (VSL) affected the performance of Chinese literacy tests in L1 and L2 leaners, but did not affect the Chinese performance of participants who are mature Chinese readers.
In Experiment 4, we followed 68 native speakers of alphabetic languages recruited in Experiment 3 to examine the potential factors that have influence on the improvement of Chinese literacy after six months. Among these participants, the students who continued to take formal Chinese lessons demonstrated greater improvement in Chinese literacy than the students who did not continue to take formal lessons. However, significant correlation of VSL with the improvement of Chinese character size was only observed in participants who did not continue to take formal Chinese lessons.
To conclude, the current findings suggest that the ability of visual perceptual skills and visual statistical learning are important to Chinese literacy acquisition in both L1 and L2 learners. | en_US |