Abstract
The present study investigated how phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming (hereafter, RAN), simultaneously contributed to Chinese reading and arithmetic fluency. Specifically, we proposed a new hypothesized mechanism that processing speed would mediate the relations of RAN with Chinese reading and arithmetic fluency. One hundred and forty-five Chinese children at the fifth grade were administered with a battery of measures, including three phonological processing measures, character reading, and whole number computation, as well as nonverbal IQ, and vocabulary knowledge. Path analyses revealed that phonological awareness and RAN were uniquely related to character reading and arithmetic fluency, while phonological memory was not significantly correlated to either character reading or arithmetic fluency, after controlling for age, nonverbal IQ, and vocabulary knowledge. Further analysis indicated that processing speed demonstrated a mediating effect on the importance of RAN in character reading, rather than in arithmetic fluency. Results underscore the potential importance of phonological awareness and RAN in character reading and arithmetic fluency, and the mediating role of processing speed in RAN to promote Chinese character reading fluency.
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The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.
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Funding
This study was funded by the STI 2030-Major Projects (2022ZD0211300 and 2021ZD0200500), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32000757), Beijing Education Science Planning of 14th Five-year (BEAA21030), Beijing Municipal Social Science Foundation (23JYC016), and by Major Research Projects in Philosophy and Social Sciences of the Ministry of Education (20JZD052).
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Yang, X., Star, J.R., Zhu, X. et al. Phonological awareness and RAN contribute to Chinese reading and arithmetic for different reasons. Cogn Process (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-024-01184-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-024-01184-2