Phonological and Semantic Knowledge Are Causal Influences on Learning to Read Words in Chinese

We report a training study that assesses whether teaching the pronunciation and meaning of spoken words improves Chinese children’s subsequent attempts to learn to read the words. Teaching the pronunciations of words helps children to learn to read those same words, and teaching the pronunciations and meanings improves learning still further. These results provide evidence that both phonological and semantic knowledge are causal influences on learning to read words aloud in Chinese. It appears that learning to read words in Chinese may entail a greater reliance on mappings from orthography to semantics than learning to read words in alphabetic orthographies