Diglossia in Chinese? It’s Complicated

This study examined the role of phonological awareness and visual-orthographic skills in Chinese reading acquisition. The subjects were 154 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 5th graders in Beijing who had learned an alphabetic script known as Hanyu Pinyin to help read Chinese characters. Children's performance on tests of various cognitive skills, reading ability, and pinyin knowledge were examined. Results of hierarchical regression analyses showed that (a) visual skills predicted reading success at lower grades; (b) pinyin knowledge and the ability to discriminate homophonic characters predicted reading success in Grades 2, 3, and 5; and (c) onset-rime awareness, but not phonemic awareness, predicted Chinese reading. This suggests 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.