Understanding the link between theory of mind and loneliness among primary school students: A cross-lagged panel model analysis.

This study aimed to investigate the longitudinal association between theory of mind (ToM) and loneliness as well as the potential moderating effects of parenting style on this association. A total of 689 Chinese third-grade students (341 girls and 348 boys; Mage = 9.23 years, SD = 0.66) were recruited from eight primary schools and were followed from Grade 3 to Grade 5. These students reported their primary caregivers' parenting style in third grade and completed the same ToM task and loneliness questionnaire at each time point from Grade 3 to Grade 5. The study's results indicated a bidirectional relationship between ToM and loneliness, implying that children with less developed ToM abilities tend to feel lonelier and, conversely, that higher levels of loneliness are associated with lower ToM skills. Moreover, the study demonstrated that parenting style influenced the association between ToM and loneliness. Specifically, the impact of ToM at Grade 3 on reducing loneliness at Grade 4 was greater among children who experienced high levels of rejection from their caregivers compared with those with low levels of rejection. In addition, this study found that loneliness at Grade 3 had a greater influence on ToM at Grade 5 for children experiencing low levels of emotional warmth from their caregivers than for those who experienced high levels of emotional warmth. These findings highlight the significance of ToM as both a precursor and consequence of children's loneliness and emphasize the variation in these longitudinal relationships based on the parenting styles of primary caregivers.

Reading Comprehension Difficulties in Chinese-English Bilingual Children.

The co-occurrence of reading comprehension difficulties for first language (L1) Chinese and second language (L2) English and associated longitudinal cognitive-linguistic correlates in each language were investigated. Sixteen poor comprehenders in English and 16 poor comprehenders in Chinese, 18 poor readers in both, and 18 children with normal performance in both were identified at age 10. The prevalence rate for being poor in both was 52.94%, suggesting that approximately half of children who are at risk for Chinese reading comprehension difficulty are also at risk for English reading comprehension difficulty. Chinese word reading, phonological, and morphological awareness were longitudinal correlates of poor comprehension in Chinese. English word reading and vocabulary were longitudinal correlates of poor comprehension in English. Chinese phonological awareness was an additional correlate of poor comprehension in English. Moreover, poor comprehenders in both Chinese and English showed slower rapid automatized naming scores than the other groups. Findings highlight some factors that might be critical for reading comprehension in L1 Chinese and L2 English; fluency is likely to be a critical part of reading comprehension across languages. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Visual attention shift to printed words during spoken word recognition in Chinese: The role of phonological information.

The aim of this study was to investigate the extent to which phonological information mediates the visual attention shift to printed Chinese words in spoken word recognition by using an eye-movement technique with a printed-word paradigm. In this paradigm, participants are visually presented with four printed words on a computer screen, which include a target word, a phonological competitor, and two distractors. Participants are then required to select the target word using a computer mouse, and the eye movements are recorded. In Experiment 1, phonological information was manipulated at the full-phonological overlap; in Experiment 2, phonological information at the partial-phonological overlap was manipulated; and in Experiment 3, the phonological competitors were manipulated to share either fulloverlap or partial-overlap with targets directly. Results of the three experiments showed that the phonological competitor effects were observed at both the full-phonological overlap and partial-phonological overlap conditions. That is, phonological competitors attracted more fixations than distractors, which suggested that phonological information mediates the visual attention shift during spoken word recognition. More importantly, we found that the mediating role of phonological information varies as a function of the phonological similarity between target words and phonological competitors.

A Three-Year Longitudinal Study of Reading and Spelling Difficulty in Chinese Developmental Dyslexia: The Matter of Morphological Awareness.

In the present study, we used a three-time point longitudinal design to investigate the associations of morphological awareness to word reading and spelling in a small group of those with and without dyslexia taken from a larger sample of 164 Hong Kong Chinese children who remained in a longitudinal study across ages 6, 7 and 8. Among those 164 children, 15 had been diagnosed as having dyslexia by professional psychologists, and 15 other children manifested average reading ability and had been randomly selected from the sample for comparison. All children were administered a battery of tasks including Chinese character recognition, word dictation, morphological awareness, phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming. Multivariate analysis of variance and predictive discriminate analysis were performed to examine whether the dyslexic children showed differences in the cognitive-linguistic tasks in comparison with controls. Results suggested that the dyslexic groups had poorer performance in morphological awareness and RAN across all 3 years. However, phonological awareness was not stable in distinguishing the groups. Findings suggest that morphological awareness is a relatively strong correlate of spelling difficulties in Chinese, but phonological awareness is not. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A Developmental Study of Chinese Children's Word and Character Reading.

To investigate the relationship between Chinese children's character and word reading, 62 third and 50 fifth grade children in Hong Kong were asked to read single characters and words that were comprised of these characters. Results showed that words helped children to recognize characters for both grades of children. Compared to older children, younger children's character reading was more likely to rely on the word that the character appeared in as a component; younger children made more errors in confusing the correct character with words related to it. Younger children's greater rate of meaning-related errors also underscored the role of the word in their character learning. This study confirmed the important role of words in children's character learning, and provided evidence for a developmental pattern of character and word reading in Chinese.

Reading Comprehension Mediates the Relationship between Syntactic Awareness and Writing Composition in Children: A Longitudinal Study.

This research aimed to explore the relation between syntactic awareness and writing composition in 129 Hong Kong Chinese children. These children were from a ten-year longitudinal project. At each year, a number of measures were administered. The 129 children's data of nonverbal reasoning at age 4, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, vocabulary knowledge at age 8, reading comprehension at age 12 and syntactic awareness and writing composition skills at ages 11 and 12 were included in this study. Syntactic awareness was longitudinally and uniquely predictive of Chinese children's writing composition, and children's performance in early writing composition was uniquely associated with their later syntactic skills, even when controlling for the contributions from age, nonverbal and verbal abilities, phonological awareness, and morphological awareness. The relationship between syntactic awareness and writing composition was mediated by children's performance in reading comprehension. These findings may suggest a reciprocal relation between syntactic awareness and writing composition, and this association may vary with ability in reading comprehension in Chinese children.

Tune in to the Tone: Lexical Tone Identification is Associated with Vocabulary and Word Recognition Abilities in Young Chinese Children.

Lexical tone is one of the most prominent features in the phonological representation of words in Chinese. However, little, if any, research to date has directly evaluated how young Chinese children's lexical tone identification skills contribute to vocabulary acquisition and character recognition. The present study distinguished lexical tones from segmental phonological awareness and morphological awareness in order to estimate the unique contribution of lexical tone in early vocabulary acquisition and character recognition. A sample of 199 Cantonese children aged 5-6 years was assessed on measures of lexical tone identification, segmental phonological awareness, morphological awareness, nonverbal ability, vocabulary knowledge, and Chinese character recognition. It was found that lexical tone awareness and morphological awareness were both associated with vocabulary knowledge and character recognition. However, there was a significant relationship between lexical tone awareness and both vocabulary knowledge and character recognition, even after controlling for the effects of age, nonverbal ability, segmental phonological awareness and morphological awareness. These findings suggest that lexical tone is a key factor accounting for individual variance in young children's lexical acquisition in Chinese, and that lexical tone should be considered in understanding how children learn new Chinese vocabulary words, in either oral or written forms.

Electrophysiological markers of orthographic pattern learning in school-aged children with reading challenges: An ERP investigation.

BACKGROUND: Previous studies suggested that children with reading difficulty have impaired statistical learning ability in extracting distributional orthographic regularities. However, the neural mechanisms underlying have not been fully investigated. AIMS: The current study aimed to identify the electrophysiological markers and to examine the neural underpinnings of statistical learning of orthographic regularities in children with reading difficulties. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: Using the event-related potentials (ERPs) and the orthographic learning task, 157 children were exposed to a sequence of artificial pseudocharacters with varying levels of positional and semantic consistency (low at 60 %, moderate at 80 %, and high at 100 %). OUTCOMES AND RESULTS: Poor readers elicited an increased N170 response in the low consistency and a lack of left-lateralized P300 effect when learning positional regularities of radicals. Similarly, larger N170 effects were observed in poor readers, while similar N400 effects were found in both poor and average readers when learning semantic regularities of radicals. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Our findings indicate that poor readers may have trouble using statistical information for early-stage orthographic pattern extraction, yet they can identify semantic inconsistencies after sufficient exposure. These results deepen our understanding of the neural mechanisms involved in statistical learning for poor readers and aid in improving criteria for differentiating between typically developing children and those with reading challenges.

Influence of Lexical Tone Similarity on Spoken Word Recognition in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence From Eye Tracking.

PURPOSE: Using the visual world paradigm with the eye-tracking technique, this study examined the extent to which lexical tone similarity influences spoken word recognition. METHOD: In two experiments, participants were audibly presented with a target word and visually presented with the same target word, a tonal competitor, and two distractors, and they were required to identify the target word. In Experiment 1, the two tonal competitors shared either acoustically highly similar tones (e.g., target word: "" /yang2tai2/, "balcony" vs. competitor: "" /yang3zi3/, "adopted son") or acoustically lowly similar tones (e.g., target word: "" /yang2tai2/, "balcony" vs. competitor: "" /yang4ben3/, "sample"). In Experiment 2, the acoustic similarity of the target words and the tonal competitors shared either acoustically highly similar tones or acoustically lowly similar tones or identical tones (e.g., target word: "" /yang2tai2/, "balcony" vs. competitor: "" /yang2mao2/, "wool"). RESULTS: The results of the two experiments consistently demonstrated a graded tonal competitor effect, in which acoustically highly similar tonal competitors attracted more visual attention than acoustically lowly similar tonal competitors. CONCLUSION: Tonal similarity plays a graded constraining role in spoken word recognition in Mandarin Chinese.

Speech Prosody and Reading Comprehension in Chinese-English Bilingual Children: The Mediating Role of Syntactic Awareness.

PURPOSE: Although children's prosodic sensitivity links with their reading comprehension, the factors affecting this link remain unclear. By simultaneously measuring first language (L1) Chinese and second language (L2) English prosodic sensitivity and reading comprehension, this study examined the mediating role of syntactic awareness on prosody-reading comprehension among Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children. METHOD: A group of 227 Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual fourth graders completed L1 and L2 prosodic sensitivity (Cantonese lexical tone awareness and English prosodic sensitivity), syntactic awareness, and reading comprehension and control measures of cognitive (nonverbal IQ, short-term memory, and working memory), metalinguistic (phonological awareness and morphological awareness), linguistic (vocabulary knowledge), and word reading skills. RESULTS: The within-language analyses showed a partial mediation effect of Chinese syntactic awareness on the relation between Cantonese lexical tone awareness and Chinese reading comprehension, but a full mediation effect of English syntactic awareness on the relation between English prosodic sensitivity and English reading comprehension. The cross-language analyses revealed a significant direct effect of Cantonese lexical tone awareness on English reading comprehension and a significant indirect effect of English prosodic sensitivity on Chinese reading comprehension via Chinese syntactic awareness. CONCLUSION: These findings suggest that, despite the language-independent mediating role of syntactic awareness in bridging prosody and reading comprehension, the degree of this mediation is shaped by language-specific prosody and its relations with other linguistic structures, including semantics.

Multiple mechanisms regulate statistical learning of orthographic regularities in school-age children: Neurophysiological evidence.

Using event-related potentials (ERPs), this study investigated how the brains of Chinese children of different ages extract and encode relational patterns contained in orthographic input. Ninety-nine Chinese children in Grades 1-3 performed an artificial orthography statistical learning task that comprised logographic components embedded in characters with high (100%), moderate (80%), and low (60%) positional consistency. The behavioral results indicated that across grades, participants more accurately recognized characters with high rather than low consistency. The neurophysiological results revealed that in each grade, the amplitude of some ERP components differed, with a larger P1 effect in the high consistency condition and a larger N170 and left-lateralized P300 effect in the low consistency condition. A smaller N170 effect occurred in Grade 3 than in Grade 1, and a larger P300 effect occurred in Grade 1 than in either Grade 2 or 3. These findings suggest the dynamic nature of statistical learning by showing that neural adaptation associated with N170, and attention and working memory related to P1 and P300, regulate different types of structural input, and that children's abilities to prioritize these mechanisms vary with context and age.

Physical activity and mental health in children and youth during COVID-19: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND: The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and universal mitigation strategies have fundamentally affected peoples' lives worldwide, particularly during the first two years of the pandemic. Reductions in physical activity (PA) and increased mental health (MH) problems among children and youth have been observed. This systematic review and meta-analysis investigated the relationship between physical activity (PA) and mental health (MH) among children and youth during the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: Four electronic databases (EMBASE, PsycINFO, PubMed, and Web of Science) were systematically searched to identify studies that (1) examined the relationship between PA and MH among children and youth (aged 2-24 years old) and (2) were published in peer-reviewed journals in English between January 2020 and December 2021. Relationships between PA and two MH aspects (i.e., negative and positive psychological responses) among children and youth at different age ranges and those with disabilities or chronic conditions (DCC) were synthesized. Meta-analyses were also performed for eligible studies to determine the pooled effect size. RESULTS: A total of 58 studies were eventually included for variable categorization, with 32 eligible for meta-analyses. Our synthesis results showed that greater PA participation was strongly related to lower negative psychological responses (i.e., anxiety, depression, stress, insomnia, fatigue, and mental health problems) and higher positive psychological responses (i.e., general well-being and vigor) in children and youth during COVID-19. The pattern and strength of relations between PA and MH outcomes varied across age ranges and health conditions, with preschoolers and those with DCC receiving less attention in the existing research. Meta-analysis results showed that the magnitude of associations of PA with negative (Fisher's z = - 0.198, p < 0.001) and positive (Fisher's z = 0.170, p < 0.001) psychological responses among children and youth was weak. These results were linked to age of participants, study quality, and reporting of PA-related information. CONCLUSIONS: PA participation and MH among children and youth deteriorated during the COVID-19 pandemic and were closely associated with each other. For the post-COVID-19 era, additional research on age- and health condition-specific relationships between PA and MH outcomes from a comprehensive perspective is warranted. (Word count: 344 words).

Syntactic awareness matters: uncovering reading comprehension difficulties in Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children.

This study examined whether syntactic awareness was related to reading comprehension difficulties in either first language (L1) Chinese or second language (L2) English, or both, among Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children. Parallel L1 and L2 metalinguistic and reading measures, including syntactic word-order, morphological awareness, phonological awareness, vocabulary, word reading, reading comprehension, and cognitive measures of nonverbal intelligence and working memory, were administered to 224 fourth-graders. Five groups of comprehenders were identified using a regression approach: (1) 12 poor in Chinese-only (PC), (2) 18 poor in English-only (PE), (3) six poor in both Chinese and English (PB), (4) 14 average in both Chinese and English (AB), and (5) seven good in both (GB). The results of multivariate analyses of covariance showed that (1) the PB group performed worse than the AB and GB groups in both L1 Chinese and L2 English syntactic awareness; (2) the PC and PE groups performed worse than the AB and GB groups in Chinese syntactic awareness; (3) the PE group had lower performance than the PC, AB, and GB groups in English syntactic awareness; and (4) no significant group difference was found in L2 morphological awareness or vocabulary across both languages. By suggesting that weakness in syntactic awareness can serve as a universal indicator for identifying poor comprehenders in either or both L1 Chinese and L2 English among Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children, these findings demonstrate the fundamental role of syntactic awareness in bilingual reading comprehension.

Copying skills in relation to word reading and writing in Chinese children with and without dyslexia.

Because Chinese character learning typically relies heavily on rote character copying, we tested independent copying skill in third- and fourth-grade Chinese children with and without dyslexia. In total, 21 Chinese third and fourth graders with dyslexia and 33 without dyslexia (matched on age, nonverbal IQ, and mother's education level) were given tasks of copying unfamiliar print in Vietnamese, Korean, and Hebrew as well as tests of word reading and writing, morphological awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and orthographic processing. All three copying tasks distinguished dyslexic children from nondyslexic children with moderate effect sizes (.67-.80). Zero-order correlations of the three copying tasks with dictation and reading ranged from .37 to .58. With age, Raven's, group status, RAN, morphological awareness, and orthographic measures statistically controlled, the copying tasks uniquely explained 6% and 3% variance in word reading and dictation, respectively. Results suggest that copying skill itself may be useful in understanding the development and impairment of literacy skills in Chinese.

The Graded Priming Effect of Semantic Radical on Chinese Character Recognition.

This study used priming paradigm with lexical decision task to examine the effects of different levels of semantic relatedness on the identification of Chinese phonetic-semantic compound characters. Unlike previous studies that simply classify Chinese compound characters as semantically transparent or opaque, we categorize the semantic relatedness between semantic radicals (i.e., prime) and the target characters containing them into five levels: highly related (i.e., high condition; e.g., prime ± vs. target ), moderately related (i.e., moderate condition; e.g., prime ± vs. target ), minimally related (i.e., minimal condition; e.g., prime ± vs. target ), unrelated but sharing the semantic radical (i.e., form-only condition; e.g., prime ± vs. target ), and unrelated without sharing the semantic radical (i.e., control condition; e.g., prime ± vs. target ). Moreover, three stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA)s (i.e., 57, 140, and 243 ms) were used in this study to dissociate the radical- and character-level semantic priming effects. Results revealed a graded priming effect of the semantic radical on character recognition in Chinese readers for all SOAs. More specifically, the facilitative effect of the semantic radical on character processing was most evident for the high condition, followed by the minimal, form-only, and control conditions. This suggests a graded priming effect of the semantic radical on character identification.

Holistic versus analytic processing: evidence for a different approach to processing of Chinese at the word and character levels in Chinese children.

Among 30 Hong Kong Chinese fourth graders, sensitivities to character and word constructions were examined in judgment tasks at each level. There were three conditions across both tasks: the real condition, consisting of either actual two-character compound Chinese words or real Chinese compound characters; the reversed condition, with either the order of the two morphemes in the word or the order of the semantic and phonetic radicals in the character reversed; and the random condition, with either two morphemes randomly combined to create arbitrary nonwords or a semantic radical and a phonetic radical randomly combined using correct orthographic rules to create noncharacters. On the word level, children performed worst in the reversed condition and best with real words, whereas on the character level, children performed worst in the random condition and best in the reversed condition. Findings imply a holistic tendency toward word-level processing and an analytic approach to character-level processing in these Chinese children.

Neurocognitive Correlates of Statistical Learning of Orthographic-Semantic Connections in Chinese Adult Learners.

We examined the neural correlates of the statistical learning of orthographic-semantic connections in Chinese adult learners. Visual event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants were exposed to a sequence of artificial logographic characters containing semantic radicals carrying low, moderate, or high levels of semantic consistency. The behavioral results showed that the mean accuracy of participants' recognition of previously exposed characters was 63.1% that was significantly above chance level (50%), indicating the statistical learning of the regularities of semantic radicals. The ERP data revealed a temporal sequence of the neural process of statistical learning of orthographic-semantic connections, and different brain indexes were found to be associated with this processing, i.e., a clear N170-P200-N400 pattern. For N170, the larger negative amplitudes were evoked by the high and moderate consistency than the low consistency. For P200, the mean amplitudes elicited by the moderate and low consistency were larger than the high consistency. In contrast, a larger N400 amplitude was observed in the low than moderate and high consistency; and more negative amplitude was elicited by the moderate than high consistency. We propose that the initial potential shifts (N170 and P200) may reflect orthographic or graphic form identification, while the later component (N400) may be associated with semantic information analysis.

The Neural Signature of Statistical Learning of Orthography.

While an increasing number of behavioral studies suggest the importance of statistical learning in acquiring orthographic regularity across writing systems, no direct neural evidence supports this claim. The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the time course and the neural correlate of statistical learning of positional consistency in Chinese orthography. Visual ERPs were recorded, while Chinese adults performed an orthographic statistical learning task involving artificial characters varying in high, moderate, and low levels of positional consistency. The negative ERP deflection at the N1 time window, typically linked with orthographic regularity processing, was found in orthographic statistical learning with the low and moderate consistencies eliciting larger neural responses than the high consistency in the time window of 150-210 ms over occipital-temporal brain areas. These results suggest that orthographic statistical learning begins within the first 210 ms and that the N1 might be its neural indicator.

Phonological, not semantic, activation dominates Chinese character recognition: Evidence from a visual world eye-tracking study.

Combining eye-tracking technique with a revised visual world paradigm, this study examined how positional, phonological, and semantic information of radicals are activated in visual Chinese character recognition. Participants' eye movements were tracked when they looked at four types of invented logographic characters including a semantic radical in the legal (e.g., [Formula: see text]) and illegal positions ([Formula: see text]), a phonetic radical in the legal (e.g., [Formula: see text]) and illegal positions (e.g., [Formula: see text]). These logographic characters were presented simultaneously with either a sound-cued (e.g., /qiao2/) or meaning-cued (e.g., a picture of a bridge) condition. Participants appeared to allocate more visual attention towards radicals in legal, rather than illegal, positions. In addition, more eye fixations occurred on phonetic, rather than on semantic, radicals across both sound- and meaning-cued conditions, indicating participants' strong preference for phonetic over semantic radicals in visual character processing. These results underscore the universal phonology principle in processing non-alphabetic Chinese logographic characters.

Visual statistical learning and orthographic awareness in Chinese children with and without developmental dyslexia.

This study examined the role of visual statistical learning in reading and writing and its relationship to orthographic awareness in Hong Kong Chinese children with and without developmental dyslexia. Thirty-five 7- to 8-year-old children with developmental dyslexia and 37 chronologically age-matched controls were tested on visual statistical learning, orthographic awareness, nonverbal cognitive ability, Chinese word reading, and word dictation tasks. Visual statistical learning was assessed using a triplet learning paradigm that required children to detect the temporal order of visual stimuli. Orthographic awareness was measured with a novel character invention task that required children to create pseudocharacters using untaught stroke patterns according to the rules of Chinese character orthography. Children with dyslexia performed significantly worse than their age-matched controls on both the visual statistical learning and orthographic awareness tasks. Furthermore, visual statistical learning was significantly associated with orthographic awareness and word reading. These findings suggest that Chinese children with dyslexia are impaired in visual statistical learning and that such deficits may be related to disrupted orthographic learning abilities, thereby contributing to their reading difficulties.