Download or read book ROLE OF VISUAL ORTHOGRAPHIC written by Pun-Lok David Kwan and published by Open Dissertation Press. This book was released on 2017-01-27 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation, "The Role of Visual and Orthographic Skills in Reading Among Chinese Dyslexic Children" by Pun-lok, David, Kwan, 關本樂, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Abstract of thesis entitled The Role of Visual and Orthographic Skills in Reading among Chinese Dyslexic Children submitted by Kwan Pun Lok, David for the degree of Master of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong in February 2004 The aims of the present studies were to investigate the importance of visual and orthographic skills in learning to read Chinese among average readers and the importance of these skills in explaining reading difficulties among Chinese dyslexic children. Study 1 examined the visual and orthographic skills of 289 Chinese average readers, ranging from grade 1 to grade 4. Results showed that visual and orthographic skills predicted reading only for younger readers at Grade 1 and 2. This pattern suggested that different reading strategies were used by children of different ages: younger readers tend to rely more on logographic word decoding which required more visual processing of graphemes, while elder readers rely more on analytic word decoding that requires less visual processing skills. In Study 2, 25 Chinese dyslexic children were compared with 35 chronological-age (CA) matched and 25 reading 2level (RL) matched readers on a variety of visual and orthographic tasks. The dyslexic children performed significantly worse than the CA group in both accuracy and speed measures of these tasks. In line with findings in Study 1, the correlation coefficients between reading and visual and orthographic accuracy scores and reading performance were not significant in both dyslexic and CA groups. On the other hand, visual and orthographic speed measures were significantly related to reading performance for both dyslexic and CA groups. We concluded that reading difficulties are related to processing speed problems, and there is an inclined importance of lower level visual skills in explaining reading skills. Study 3 examined the online reading performance of Chinese dyslexic readers using the eye tracking technique. 15 dyslexic children were compared with 30 chronological-age matched average readers on various eye movement parameters. Dyslexic children were found to have longer fixation duration and higher number of fixations, which were related to processing speed problems and the need to gain more information respectively. In addition, they were less efficient in making fixations on information regions and had more erratic scan orders while scanning through text. It is concluded that reading difficulties were related to visual and orthographic speed difficulties plus an over reliance of lower-level visual skills, and word decoding difficulties were in turn reflected in text reading difficulties. DOI: 10.5353/th_b2932596 Subjects: Chinese language - Transliteration Reading - Ability testing Word recognition Dyslexic children - China - Hong Kong

Download or read book The Role of Visual and Orthographic Skills in Reading Among Chinese Dyslexic Children written by Pun-lok Kwan (David) and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book ROLE OF PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS written by Wai-Ting Siok and published by Open Dissertation Press. This book was released on 2017-01-27 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation, "The Role of Phonological Awareness and Visual-orthographic Skills in Chinese Reading Acquisition" by Wai-ting, Siok, 蕭慧婷, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Abstract of thesis entitled 'The Role Of Phonological Awareness And Visual-Orthographic Skills In Chinese Reading Acquisition' submitted by Siok Wai Ting for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong in March 2001 This study examined the role of phonological awareness and visuo- orthographic processing skills in the development of Chinese reading abilities. Research using alphabetic languages has generally shown that phonological awareness, the ability to conceive of spoken words as sequences of smaller units of sound segments, is strongly related to success in reading. In particular, phonological awareness measured at both the onset- rime and the phonemic level relates to alphabetic reading success. Written Chinese has a logographic feature where the characters map onto the morpheme and cannot be pronounced by recourse to grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules. It is likely that the nature of phonological awareness that relates to Chinese reading is different from that of English. The study recruited 154 1st to 5th graders in Beijing. Before they were taught to read Chinese characters, these subjects had learned an alphabetic script known as Hanyu Pinyin, which helps the association of a visual character form and its pronunciation in later reading acquisition. Children's performance on tests of various cognitive skills, reading ability and pinyin knowledge were examined. Specifically, phonological awareness was assessed by 4 tasks that varied in linguistic complexity (onset-rime, tonal and phonemic level) to ascertain which level of phonological units best predicts Chinese reading. These subjects were tested again one year later on measures of reading ability and pinyin knowledge to discover the longitudinal relationship of these measures with the various cognitive skills. Results using the hierarchical multiple regression and the structural equation approach showed that (1) visual skills predicted reading success at lower grades, (2) pinyin knowledge and the ability to discriminate homophonic characters were longitudinally predictive of later reading success, (3) onset-rime awareness, but not phonemic awareness, predicted Chinese reading, and (4) there was a reciprocal relationship between pinyin knowledge and reading success. These findings suggest 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. Moreover, this study has demonstrated the importance and effectiveness of the adoption of pinyin as a learning tool from a psychological perspective. These findings have important implications for education in Hong Kong, where no phonetic script is adopted to aid Chinese reading, unlike reading acquisition in Taiwan or Mainland China. Learning to read Chinese in Hong Kong is painstaking, which involves tremendous amount of rote memory and writing exercises, and children have difficulties in reading Chinese texts at home as there is no guidance on how to pronounce unfamiliar Chinese characters. Without teacher's or parents' help, Hong Kong children do not know the sounds of newly encountered characters, unlike Mainland children who can read with the help of pinyin. This casts doubts on the effectiveness of using Chinese as the instruction medium in Ho

Download or read book The Neural Basis of Reading written by Piers Cornelissen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-28 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading is a unique human ability that has become very pivotal for functioning in our world today. As modern societies rely extensively on literacy skills, and as reading disabilities have profound personal, economic and social consequences, it is surprising that we have a very underdeveloped scientific understanding of the neural basis of reading and visual word recognition in the normal brain. This book fills this gap in the literature by addressing some of the fundamental questions in reading research.

Download or read book The Role of Phonological Awareness and Visual Orthographic Skills on Chinese Reading Acquisitions for Singapore Students written by Ping-Ping Ho and published by Open Dissertation Press. This book was released on 2017-01-27 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation, "The Role of Phonological Awareness and Visual-orthographic Skills on Chinese Reading Acquisitions for Singapore Students" by Ping-ping, Ho, 何冰冰, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: DOI: 10.5353/th_b3692400 Subjects: Chinese language - Phonology Chinese characters - Psychological aspects Language awareness in children - Singapore Reading comprehension Chinese language - Study and teaching (Elementary) - Singapore School children - Singapore - Language

Download or read book General Visual and Visual orthographic Skills in Learning to Read Chinese Characters written by Yang Luo and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese orthography consists of visually complex characters, which leads to the belief that visual processing is important. This study examined the extent to which general visual and visual-orthographic skills predicted children's. Chinese character reading in China and Canada. Participants were 122 children in China and 93 children in Canada from kindergarten to Grade 2. General visual skills were measured with three subtests of the Test of Visual-Perceptual Skills (TVPS)-Revised (Gardner, 1996). Visual-orthographic skills were measured by three visual-orthographic (VO) experimental tasks. Children were also tested on character reading, rapid digit naming, phonological awareness and phonological strategy use. The study showed children in China outperformed their Canadian counterparts in visual-orthographic processing, but not in general visual processing. Compared with general visual skills, visual-orthographic skills were a better predictor of Chinese character reading. Further, the importance of visual skills in predicting character reading decreased from kindergarten to Grade 2.

Download or read book Developmental Dyslexia across Languages and Writing Systems written by Ludo Verhoeven and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-03 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first truly systematic, multi-disciplinary, and cross-linguistic study of the language and writing system factors affecting the emergence of dyslexia.

Download or read book The Impact of Learning to Read on Visual Processing written by Tânia Fernandes and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2016-01-26 with total page 75 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading is at the interface between the vision and spoken language domains. An emergent bulk of research indicates that learning to read strongly impacts on non-linguistic visual object processing, both at the behavioral level (e.g., on mirror image processing – enantiomorphy) and at the brain level (e.g., inducing top-down effects as well as neural competition effects). Yet, many questions regarding the exact nature, locus, and consequences of these effects remain hitherto unanswered. The current Special Topic aims at contributing to the understanding of how such a cultural activity as reading might modulate visual processing by providing a landmark forum in which researchers define the state of the art and future directions on this issue. We thus welcome reviews of current work, original research, and opinion articles that focus on the impact of literacy on the cognitive and/or brain visual processes. In addition to studies directly focusing on this topic, we will consider as highly relevant evidence on reading and visual processes in typical and atypical development, including in adult people differing in schooling and literacy, as well as in neuropsychological cases (e.g., developmental dyslexia). We also encourage researchers on nonhuman primate visual processing to consider the potential contribution of their studies to this Special Topic.

Download or read book Handbook of Orthography and Literacy written by R. Malatesha Joshi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until about two decades ago, the study of writing systems and their relationship to literacy acquisition was sparse and generally modeled after studies of English language learners. This situation is now changing. As the worldwide demand for literacy continues to grow, researchers from different countries with different language backgrounds have begun examining the connection between their writing systems and literacy acquisition. This text, which derives from a NATO sponsored conference on orthography and literacy, brings together the research of 70 scholars from across the world--the largest assemblage of such experts to date. Their findings are grouped into three parts, as follows: Part I, Literacy Acquisition in Different Writing Systems, describes the relationship between orthography and literacy in twenty-five orthographic systems. This section serves as a handy reference source for understanding the orthographies of languages as diverse as Arabic, Chinese, English, Icelandic, Kannada, and Kishwahili. Part II, Literacy Acquisition From a Cross-Linguistic Perspective, makes direct comparisons of literacy acquisition in English and other orthographic systems. The overall conclusion that emerges from these eight chapters is that the depth of an orthographic system does influence literacy acquisition primarily by slowing down the acquisition of reading skills. Even so, studies show that dyslexic readers can be found across all orthographic systems whether shallow or deep, which shows that dyslexia also has internal cognitive and biological components. Part III, Literacy Acquisition: Instructional Perspectives, explores literacy acquisition from developmental and instructional perspectives and ends with a look into the future of literacy research. This Handbook is appropriate for scholars, researchers, and graduate students in such diverse fields as cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, literacy education, English as a second language, and communication disorders.

Download or read book Teaching Chinese Literacy in the Early Years written by Hui Li and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-21 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Chinese language is now used by a quarter of the world’s population and is increasingly popular as a second language. Teaching Chinese Literacy in the Early Years comprehensively investigates the psychology, pedagogy and practice involved in teaching Chinese literacy to young children. This text not only explores the psycholinguistic and neuropsychological processing involved in learning Chinese literacy but also introduces useful teaching methods and effective practices relevant for teaching within early years and primary education. Key issues explored within this text include: The Psycholinguistics of Chinese Literacy Neuropsychological Understanding of Chinese Literacy The pedagogy of teaching Chinese as a first language The Pedagogy of Teaching Chinese as a second language Teaching Chinese literacy in early childhood settings Assessing Chinese Literacy Attainment in the Early Years With the addition of two reliable Chinese literacy scales, Teaching Chinese Literacy in the Early Years is an essential text for any student, lecturer or professional teacher who is interested in learning and teaching Chinese literacy.

Download or read book Fluency and Reading Comprehension in Typical Readers and Dyslexics Readers written by Simone A. Capellini and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2018-02-22 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading involves decoding and comprehension components and, to become efficient, it requires a large number of cognitive and linguistic processes. Among those, the phonological awareness, the alphabetic principle, the decoding, the fluency, the lexical development and the text comprehension development. The reading comprehension is strongly related with the development of vocabulary, oral language, linguistic skills, memory skills and ability to make inferences, and the world experiences of each individual. These processes become important only when the professional needs to deal with students presenting difficulties in learning how to read. The difficulty using the knowledge of conversion rules between grapheme and phoneme to the word reading construction characterizes the dyslexia, which is a specific learning disorder with a neurological source. These difficulties presented by students with dyslexia interfere in their learning process impairing the learning development. Knowing and following the reading development and its processes, as well as obtaining the punctuation of fluency abilities and students comprehension allow us to understand what happens when the student presents difficulties to read. This could help in the identification of learning disabilities and in the development of intervention programs.

Download or read book Reading and Writing Disorders in Different Orthographic Systems written by P. G. Aaron and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even though Specific Reading Disability (Dyslexia) has been clinically recognized as a developmental learning disorder for nearly a hundred years. only within the past two decades it has become the subject of major experimental investigation. Because. by definition. dyslexic children are of average or superior intelligence. it is often suspected that some arcane feature of the written language is responsible for the inordinate difficulty experienced by these children in learning to read. The occasional claim that developmental dyslexia is virtually nonexistent in some languages coupled with the fact that languages differ in their writing systems has further rendered orthography a subject of serious investigation. The present Volume represents a collection of preliminary reports of investigations that explored the relationship between orthography and reading disabilities in different languages. Even though not explicitly stated. these reports are concerned with the question whether or not some orthographies are easier to learn to read and write than others. One dimension on which orthographies differ from each other is the kind of relationship they bear to pronunciation. The orthographies examined in this book range from the ones that have a simple one-to one grapheme-phoneme relationship to those which have a more complex relationship.

Download or read book Reading Development in Chinese Children written by Catherine McBride-Chang and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2003-12-30 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text reviews both similarities and unique cultural, linguistic, and script differences of Chinese relative to alphabetic reading, and even across Chinese regions. Chinese reading acquisition relies upon children's strongly developing analytic skills, as highlighted here. These 16 chapters present state-of-the-art research on diverse aspects of Chinese children's reading development. This edited volume presents research on Chinese children's reading development across Chinese societies. Authors from China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, among others, present the latest findings on how Chinese children learn to read. Reading acquisition in Chinese involves some parameters typically not encountered in some other orthographies, such as English. For example, Chinese readers in different regions might speak different, mutually unintelligible languages, be taught to read with or without the aid of a phonetic coding system, and learn different scripts. This book both implicitly and explicitly considers these and other contextual issues in relation to developmental and cognitive factors involved in Chinese literacy acquisition. One of the clearest themes to emerge from this volume is that, across regions, Chinese children, despite lack of explicit teaching of phonetic or semantic character components, learn to read largely by integrating visible print-sound and print-meaning connections. Rather than learning to read Chinese characters by rote, as is sometimes mistakenly believed, these children are analytic learners. Chapters in this book also cover such topics as Chinese children's reading comprehension, cognitive characteristics of good and poor readers, and reading strategies of bilingual and biscriptal readers. This book is a useful reference for anyone interested in understanding either developing or skilled reading of Chinese or for those interested in literacy learning across cultures.

Download or read book The Role of Morphological Awareness Among Mandarin Speaking and Cantonese Speaking Children written by Hui Luan and published by Open Dissertation Press. This book was released on 2017-01-27 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation, "The Role of Morphological Awareness Among Mandarin-speaking and Cantonese-speaking Children" by Hui, Luan, 欒輝, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Abstract of thesis entitled The Role of Morphological Awareness In Chinese Developmental Dyslexia Submitted by Hui Luan for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Koiig in August 2005 Chinese is a non-alphabetic and morpheme-based language. For its unique characteristics, many researchers believe that morphological knowledge may play a more important role in reading Chinese than i11 alphabetic languages. Recent research findings have showed that morphological awareness is very important in Chinese reading acquisition and even has more contribution than phonological awareness to predict reading performance in Chinese (McBride-Chang, 2003; Li, 2002; Wang, 1999). However, the role of morphological awareness in Chinese developmental dyslexia has not been examined before. To fill this gap, the aims of the present study were to examine: (a), the unique contribution of morphological awareness to reading among Mandarin-speaking and Cantonese-speaking children; (b), the role of phonological awareness and orthographic awareness in morphological awareness; (c), whether morphological deficit exists in Chinese developmental dyslexia; and (d), the relative contribution of morphological awareness to reading failure as coinpared with other cognitive slulls. To address the first two aims, two groups of average readers speaking Cantonese or Mandarin were recruited and tested on morphological awareness, phonological awareness, rapid naming, phonological memory, orthographic knowledge and visual skills. The results of regression analyses showed that morphological awareness have great and unique contribution to reading ainong the Chinese average readers, and the role of phonological awareness and orthographic awareness in molyhological awareness is significant among Mandarin-speaking and .Cantonese-speaking children respectively. To address the third and fourth aims, two groups of dyslexic children speaking Cantonese or Mandarin, with average readers of the same chronological age (CA) and average readers of the same reading level (RL) as controls, were tested on morphological awareness. The results of group comparison showed that the dyslexic children performed worse than CA controls in nearly all the morphological tasks, but similar to RL controls in most of the morphological tasks. Individual analyses showed that morphological deficit was prevalent for both Cantonese-speaking and Mandarin-speaking children. The present findings were the first time to show the existence and high prevalence of morphological deficit in Chinese developmental dyslexia. The results of individual analyses showed that morphological deficit, phonological awareness deficit and naming speed deficit are three most dominant deficits among Mandarin-speaking dyslexic children, while morphological deficit, naming speed deficit and orthographic deficit are three most dominant deficits among Cantonese-speaking dyslexics. DOI: 10.5353/th_b3621063 Subjects: Chinese language - Morphology Chinese language - Phonology Language awareness in children Dyslexic children

Download or read book INVESTIGATING COGNITIVE ABILIT written by Yujie Qi and published by Open Dissertation Press. This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation, "Investigating Cognitive Abilities in Chinese Reading and Dictation: a Training and Correlation Study" by Yujie, Qi, 亓玉杰, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: This thesis examines the unique role of writing in reading and dictation as well as the common and unique cognitive abilities related to reading and dictation development among Chinese children. While it is generally accepted that phonological awareness is of critical importance for both reading and spelling in alphabetic languages (Goswami, 2000), writing seems to play an essential role in reading logographic Chinese. Recent correlation studies among young Chinese children (e.g., Tan et al., 2005) and training studies among adult second language learners of Chinese (e.g., Guan et al., 2011) showed that writing is closely related to the learning of Chinese characters. To further examine the underlying mechanism of the contribution of writing in learning Chinese characters, this thesis compared writing training with reading-only training (Study 1a) and with orthographic training (Study 1b) among Grade One primary school children in Mainland China. Study 1 provides evidence of strong but differential writing facilitation effects on the learning of Chinese characters in various aspects including reading and dictation ability. As the findings of Study 1 showed that writing facilitation effect was stronger on dictation performance than on reading performance, it is hypothesized that reading and dictation in Chinese are not like reading and spelling in alphabetic languages since Chinese has its own language-specific features. In order to verify this hypothesis and provide more evidence of how certain cognitive abilities contribute to reading and dictation separately, Study 2 examined the contributions of various aspects of cognitive abilities including non-verbal intelligence, orthographic awareness, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, visual-motor skills, and working memory, to reading and dictation ability among 126 primary school children of two groups (beginning readers and intermediate readers) in Mainland China. Commonalities as well as differences between reading and dictation were identified at different stages of learning. It is found that reading in Chinese depends heavily on phonological awareness, as the universal phonological principle (Perfetti et al., 1992) predicts, but dictation does not, quite unlike the situation in alphabetic languages. However, dictation in Chinese is found to rely more on cognitive abilities that involve some visual orthographic aspects of processing like orthographic awareness and writing skill. These findings have important theoretical as well as pedagogical implications for Chinese literacy development. The training study provides evidence in support of the important role of writing in learning Chinese, as well as the motor programming hypothesis of the writing facilitation effect (Tan et al., 2005). The findings of the correlation study further extend the lexical quality hypothesis (Perfetti, 2007) by showing that differential demands of the quality of lexical representations exist in reading and dictation in Chinese. Specifically, reading depends more on phonological lexical quality and dictation more on orthographic lexical quality. It is therefore proposed that writing practice should be encouraged among young native Chinese children. To better learn to read, phonological awareness should be enhanced, and to better learn to write to dictation, orthographic awareness should be emphasized, together with other

Download or read book The Morphology of Chinese written by Jerome L. Packard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-08-03 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ground breaking study dispels the common belief that Chinese 'doesn't have words' but instead 'has characters'. Jerome Packard's book provides a comprehensive discussion of the linguistic and cognitive nature of Chinese words. It shows that Chinese, far from being 'morphologically impoverished', has a different morphological system because it selects different 'settings' on parameters shared by all languages. The analysis of Chinese word formation therefore enhances our understanding of word universals. Packard describes the intimate relationship between words and their components, including how the identities of Chinese morphemes are word-driven, and offers new insights into the evolution of morphemes based on Chinese data. Models are offered for how Chinese words are stored in the mental lexicon and processed in natural speech, showing that much of what native speakers know about words occurs innately in the form of a hard-wired, specifically linguistic 'program' in the brain.

Download or read book Probing Into the Underlying Neural Basis of Reading in Chinese written by Nga-Min Ip and published by . This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation, "Probing Into the Underlying Neural Basis of Reading in Chinese" by Nga-min, Ip, 葉雅文, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Burgeoning research has been done on reading and developmental dyslexia in different writing systems over the past decades. The prevailing view of reading research is that the left middle frontal gyrus (LMFG) is more strongly activated in reading logographic Chinese than in reading alphabetic scripts such as English. This region seems to also serve as a useful marker of Chinese dyslexia for it exhibits both functional and structural aberrations of the dyslexic brain (Siok et al., 2008). Although different groups of researchers have corroborated the association between the LMFG activation and Chinese reading across multifarious experimental task paradigms, the contributing factors of this region to reading performance in Chinese is still ill-defined. Behavioral studies do not appear to be capable of providing an adequate answer to this question either. Various processing skills -ranging from phonological, visual, orthographic, morphological, radical, rapid naming to handwriting -have all shown to reflect connections with reading in Chinese. Without a clear understanding of the exact core nature and the underlying neural basis of Chinese reading, it renders difficulties in providing early identification for potentially impaired readers and effective reading strategies for beginning readers and dyslexic individuals. The present study, therefore, sought to annotate the determining functions of the LMFG in Chinese reading. Past research has characterized working memory as one of the pivotal functions of the LMFG, and speculated that reading might rely on this cognitive skill (Siok et al., 2004, 2008). Four distinct fMRI tasks, all consisting of the working memory component but varying in their respective processing skills, were reported. Task 1 and 2 focused on executive functioning skills; Task 3 and 4 emphasized visual-orthography and phonology respectively. 19normal-reading university students in the Mainland China participated in this neuroimaging study. All four tasks triggered the activity in the LMFG at BA 9, but significant correlations between brain activity of this region and Chinese reading performance were not obtained for all cases, except for contrasts of task conditions where in working memory involving executive control and phonological processes was being measured. It is comprehensible why they are critical to one's Chinese reading ability when the linguistic features of Chinese are taken into consideration. Chinese character processing is likely to necessitate higher-level executive control on top of simple storage since it demands simultaneous coordination of multiple components -phonology, visual-orthography and semantics. The relationship between working memory with executive control and reading performance was further substantiated by the follow-up behavioral study on Grade 4 children. The current findings have presented a clear line of evidence regarding the underlying factors in Chinese reading and underscored the role of working memory. This prominently contributes to future work on reading development and dyslexia. DOI: 10.5353/th_b5689313 Subjects: Reading disability Neurosciences