Emotion dysregulation between mothers, fathers, and adolescents: Implications for adolescents' internalizing problems.

INTRODUCTION: The present study calls attention to the longitudinal relations between mothers', fathers', and adolescents' emotion dysregulation and adolescents' internalizing problems. To this end, we tested the associations between family members' emotion dysregulation and adolescents' internalizing problems over time. METHODS: Over a 12-month period, 386 Chinese families from Hong Kong involving mothers, fathers, and adolescent children (children at 12-17 years of age; boys = 185, girls = 201) completed a set of questionnaires twice. RESULTS: Multi-group path analysis revealed unidirectional effects of mothers' emotion dysregulation on fathers' and adolescents' emotion dysregulation over time. Adolescents' emotion dysregulation was also related to their subsequent internalizing problems. The associations did not differ as a function of adolescents' gender. CONCLUSION: The present findings underscore the significance of mothers' emotion dysregulation on fathers' and adolescents' emotion dysregulation. As a risk factor, adolescents' emotion dysregulation was also predictive of their internalizing problems 12 months later. Taken together, this study serves to inform prevention and intervention efforts in promoting emotion regulation as a family asset associated with fewer adolescents' internalizing problems.

Contributions of syntactic awareness to reading in Chinese-speaking adolescent readers with and without dyslexia.

This study investigated the relative contribution of syntactic awareness to Chinese reading among Chinese-speaking adolescent readers with and without dyslexia. A total of 78 junior high school students in Hong Kong, 26 dyslexic adolescent readers, 26 average adolescent readers of the same age (chronological age control group) and 26 younger readers matched with the same reading level (reading-level group) participated and were administered measures of IQ, syntactic awareness, morphological awareness, vocabulary knowledge, working memory, word reading, and reading comprehension. Results showed that dyslexic readers scored significantly lower than chronological age but similarly to reading level control groups in most measures, especially in the areas of syntactic skills. Analyses of individual data also revealed that over half of the dyslexic readers exhibited certain aspects of deficits in syntactic skills. In regression analyses, syntactic skills were the strongest predictors of ability in word reading and reading comprehension measures. This study highlights the uniquely important correlates of syntactic skills in Chinese reading acquisition and impairment.

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.

Evaluation of a school-based dissemination of the movement guidelines for young children in Hong Kong: Study protocol.

BACKGROUND: Healthy movement behaviors in early childhood are believed to track to adulthood, potentially imparting protective benefits against non-communicable diseases. Highlighting the collaborative and complementary roles of parents and educators in promoting health of young children, this study aims to enable parents and teachers to successfully promote healthy movement behaviors in young children. Guidelines for physical activity, sedentary screen time, and sleep of children aged 2 to 6 years will be systematically disseminated to parents and teachers of children enrolled in early childhood education centers (ECECs) in Hong Kong. An evaluation will be conducted to assess the implementation process and the outcomes of the dissemination of said guidelines. METHODS: The evaluation will include formative and summative components to examine the implementation (i.e., process evaluation) and the outcomes (i.e., outcome evaluation). Participants include teachers, parents, and children from ECECs in Hong Kong. The process evaluation will be guided by the RE-AIM framework (i.e., reach, efficacy, adaptation, implementation, maintenance). Data gathering and analysis will take a mixed-methods triangulation design - convergence model. The outcome evaluation consists of a non-randomized observational study, using quantitative data from questionnaires and accelerometers. The primary outcome to be measured is the extent to which children meet the guidelines for physical activity, sedentary screen time, and sleep; the secondary outcome is teachers' and parents' knowledge and awareness of the guidelines. DISCUSSION: Young children who engage in healthy movement behaviors are likely to become adults who will have the disposition to engage in behaviors that have protective effects against non-communicable diseases. The findings of this evaluation are expected to contribute to improving the strategies of systems and government agencies that aspire to promote healthy movement behaviors of young children.

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.

Cognitive profiles of Chinese adolescents with dyslexia.

The present study sought to identify cognitive abilities that might distinguish Hong Kong Chinese adolescents with and without dyslexia and examined the cognitive profile of dyslexic adolescents in order to better understand this important problem. The performance of 27 Chinese adolescents with childhood diagnoses of dyslexia was compared with 27 adolescents of the same chronological age (CA) and 27 of matched reading level (RL) on measures of literacy and cognitive abilities: Chinese word reading, one-minute reading, reading comprehension, dictation, verbal short-term memory, rapid naming, visual-orthographic knowledge, morphological and phonological awareness. The results indicated that the dyslexic group scored lower than the CA group, but similar to the RL group, especially in the areas of rapid naming, visual-orthographic knowledge and morphological awareness, with over half having multiple deficits exhibited 2 or more cognitive areas. Furthermore, the number of cognitive deficits was associated with the degree of reading and spelling impairment. These findings suggest that adolescents with childhood diagnoses of dyslexia have persistent literacy difficulties and seem to have multiple causes for reading difficulties in Chinese.

Perception of tone and aspiration contrasts in Chinese children with dyslexia.

BACKGROUND: Previous research has shown a relationship between speech perception and dyslexia in alphabetic writing. In these studies speech perception was measured using phonemes, a prominent feature of alphabetic languages. Given the primary importance of lexical tone in Chinese language processing, we tested the extent to which lexical tone and aspiration, two fundamental dimensions of Cantonese speech not represented in writing, would distinguish dyslexic from non-dyslexic 8-year-old Chinese children. Tone and aspiration were tested in addition to other phonological processing skills across groups to determine the importance of different aspects of phonological sensitivity in relation to reading disability. METHODS: Dyslexic children and age-matched and reading-level controls were tested on their categorical perception of minimal pairs contrasting in tone and aspiration, phonological awareness, rapid digit naming, and Chinese reading abilities. RESULTS: While performing similarly to reading-level controls, dyslexic children perceived tone and aspiration contrasts less categorically and accurately than age-matched controls. They also performed more poorly than the age-matched controls on rapid digit naming and a measure of phonological awareness testing children's sensitivity to different grain size units. CONCLUSIONS: Dyslexia in non-alphabetic Chinese correlates with the categorical organization and accuracy of Cantonese speech perception, along the tone and aspiration dimensions. This association with reading is mediated by its association with phonological awareness. Therefore, dyslexia is universally at least partly a function of basic speech and phonological processes independent of whether the speech dimensions in question are coded in writing.

Syntactic and discourse skills in Chinese adolescent readers with dyslexia: a profiling study.

This study aims to investigate the relation of syntactic and discourse skills to morphological skills, rapid naming, and working memory in Chinese adolescent readers with dyslexia and to examine their cognitive-linguistic profiles. Fifty-two dyslexic readers (mean age, 13;42) from grade 7 to 9 in Hong Kong high schools were compared with 52 typically developing readers of the same chronological age (mean age, 13;30) in the measures of word reading, 1-min word reading, reading comprehension, morpheme discrimination, morpheme production, morphosyntactic knowledge, sentence order knowledge, digit rapid naming, letter rapid naming, backward digit span, and non-word repetition. Results showed that dyslexic readers performed significantly worse than their peers on all the cognitive-linguistic tasks. Analyses of individual performance also revealed that over half of the dyslexic readers exhibited deficits in syntactic and discourse skills. Moreover, syntactic skills, morphological skills, and rapid naming best distinguished dyslexic from non-dyslexic readers. Findings underscore the significance of syntactic and discourse skills for understanding reading impairment in Chinese adolescent readers.

Neural correlates of acoustic cues of English lexical stress in Cantonese-speaking children.

The present study investigated the temporal course of neural discriminations of acoustic cues of English lexical stress (i.e., pitch, intensity and duration) in Cantonese-speaking children. We used an event-related potential (ERP) measure with a multiple-deviant oddball paradigm to record auditory mismatch responses to four deviants, namely, a change in pitch, intensity, or duration, or a change in all three acoustic dimensions, of English lexical stress in familiar words. In the time window of 170-270 ms, we found that the pitch deviant elicited significant positive mismatch responses (p-MMRs) and that the duration deviant elicited a mismatch negativity (MMN) response as compared with the standard. In the time window of 270-400 ms, the intensity deviant elicited a significant p-MMR, whereas both the duration and the three-dimension changed deviants elicited significant MMNs. These results suggest that Cantonese-speaking children are sensitive to either single or convergent acoustic cues of English words, and that the relative weighting of pitch, intensity and duration in stress processing may correlate with different ERP components at different time windows in Cantonese second graders.

Segmental and suprasegmental features in speech perception in Cantonese-speaking second graders: an ERP study.

Using a multiple-deviant oddball paradigm, this study examined second graders' brain responses to Cantonese speech. We aimed to address the question of whether a change in a consonant or lexical tone could be automatically detected by children. We measured auditory mismatch responses to place of articulation and voice onset time (VOT), reflecting segmental perception, as well as Cantonese lexical tones including level tone and contour tone, reflecting suprasegmental perception. The data showed that robust mismatch negativities (MMNs) were elicited by all deviants in the time window of 300-500 ms in second graders. Moreover, relative to the standard stimuli, the VOT deviant elicited a robust positive mismatch response, and the level tone deviant elicited a significant MMN in the time window of 150-300 ms. The findings suggest that Hong Kong second graders were sensitive to neural discriminations of speech sounds both at the segmental and suprasegmental levels.

Evidence for a deficit in orthographic structure processing in Chinese developmental dyslexia: an event-related potential study.

The present event-related potential (ERP) study aimed to examine group differences in processing of orthographic information in Chinese children with dyslexia and typically developing children. Twelve dyslexic (ages 100-125 months) and 11 control (ages 104-124 months) children were given a character decision task (similar to a lexical decision task). For the control group, the radical position information influenced the character processing at a later stage of semantic information processing as reflected by a more negative N400 component in the pseudocharacter condition, in which the semantic and phonetic radical were combined following correct orthographic rules, as compared to the noncharacter condition, in which the structure of the semantic and phonetic radicals was reversed from that for each real character. In contrast, the dyslexic group showed no such differences across the experimental conditions for the N400 component. Results suggest that Chinese children with dyslexia may have a deficit in processing orthographic information (specifically, radical position). Furthermore, a late positive component (LPC) was elicited in both groups, suggesting that children may have to back track on their earlier semantic memory in order to make a final decision as to whether the character is real or not.

Cognitive skills and literacy performance of Chinese adolescents with and without dyslexia.

The present study sought to identify cognitive abilities that might distinguish Hong Kong Chinese adolescents with dyslexia and to assess how these abilities were associated with Chinese word reading, word dictation, and reading comprehension. The cognitive skills of interest were morphological awareness, visual-orthographic knowledge, rapid naming, and verbal working memory. A total of 90 junior secondary school students, 30 dyslexic, 30 chronological age controls, and 30 reading level controls was tested on a range of cognitive and literacy tasks. Dyslexic students were less competent than the control students in all cognitive and literacy measures. The regression analyses also showed that verbal working memory, rapid naming, morphological awareness, and visual-orthographic knowledge were significantly associated with literacy performance. Findings underscore the importance of these cognitive skills for Chinese literacy acquisition. Overall, this study highlights the persistent difficulties of Chinese dyslexic adolescents who seem to have multiple causes for reading and spelling difficulties.

The processing of morphological structure information in Chinese coordinative compounds: an event-related potential study.

The aim of this study was to investigate the morphological structure processing of Chinese compounds at short SOAs of 57ms. Event-related potentials were recorded while 16 Hong Kong Chinese university students were instructed to make visual lexical decisions in a decision-making task involving Chinese compound words. Only words in the category of the coordinative compounding structure were included in the present study. In this compounding structure, both morphemes comprising the compound word are of equal importance, similar to the phrase "in-and-out" in English, where neither "in" nor "out" can be considered the head or modifier in the compound; both morphemes are of equal weight in communicating meaning. While the classic N400 semantic priming effect was replicated at this short SOA, an earlier P250 component, suggested to reflect semantic memory network activation during semantic information processing, was also obtained. The morphological structure effect was only found in the P250 component, suggesting that morphological structure may automatically influence the semantic information processing during Chinese compound word processing.

The role of visual and auditory temporal processing for Chinese children with developmental dyslexia.

This study examined temporal processing in relation to Chinese reading acquisition and impairment. The performances of 26 Chinese primary school children with developmental dyslexia on tasks of visual and auditory temporal order judgement, rapid naming, visual-orthographic knowledge, morphological, and phonological awareness were compared with those of 26 reading level ability controls (RL) and 26 chronological age controls (CA). Dyslexic children performed worse than the CA group but similar to the RL group on measures of accurate processing of auditory and visual-order stimuli, rapid naming, morphological awareness, and phonological awareness and a minority performed worse on the two temporal processing tasks. However, hierarchical regression analyses revealed that visual but not auditory temporal processing contributed unique variance to Chinese character recognition even with other cognitive measures controlled, suggesting it may be as important a correlate of reading ability in Chinese as in alphabetic scripts.

In search of subtypes of Chinese developmental dyslexia.

The dual-route model offers a popular way to classify developmental dyslexia into phonological and surface subtypes. The current study examined whether this dual-route model could provide a framework for understanding the varieties of Chinese developmental dyslexia. Three groups of Chinese children (dyslexics, chronological-age controls, and reading-level controls) were tested on Chinese exception character reading, pseudocharacter reading (analogous to English nonword reading), novel word learning, and some phonological and orthographic skills. It was found that Chinese exception character reading and pseudocharacter reading were highly correlated and that orthographic skills was a better predictor of both Chinese exception character and pseudocharacter reading than was phonological skills. More than half (62%) of the children in the dyslexia sample were classified as belonging to the surface subtype, but no children were classified as belonging to the phonological subtype. These results suggested that the lexical and sublexical routes in Chinese are highly interdependent or that there may be only one route from print to speech as suggested by the connectionist models. Chinese dyslexic children generally are characterized as having delays in various phonological and orthographic skills, but some, such as those identified as surface dyslexics in the current study, are more severely impaired.

Word learning deficit among Chinese dyslexic children.

The present study examined word learning difficulties in Chinese dyslexic children, readers of a nonalphabetic script. A total of 105 Hong Kong Chinese children were recruited and divided into three groups: Dyslexic (mean age 8;8), CA control (mean age 8;9), and RL control (mean age 6; 11). They were given a word learning task and a familiar word writing task. It was found that the Dyslexic group performed less well than the RL group in learning irregular words over trials but not the regular ones. Error analyses showed that the Dyslexic group made more orthographic and word association errors but less intra-wordlist interference errors than the RL control group. The Dyslexic group also performed significantly less well than both control groups in writing familiar words (e.g. their own name). These findings suggest that Chinese dyslexic children have difficulty learning new words, especially irregular ones, and retaining overlearned words in long-term memory. We conclude that Chinese dyslexic children have a specific impairment in word learning like their alphabetic counterparts.