Visuospatial memory uniquely predicts Chinese reading comprehension in Hong Kong typically developing kindergarteners
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Visuospatial memory uniquely predicts Chinese reading comprehension in Hong Kong typically developing kindergarteners Jue Pan1 · Dan Lin2
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This study investigated the direct and indirect roles of verbal and visuospatial memory in Chinese reading comprehension. One hundred twenty-eight Cantonese-speaking children participated in the study at the end of their 3rd year of kindergarten in Hong Kong. Both verbal and visuospatial memory were found to be significantly associated with Chinese reading comprehension. Path analysis showed that visuospatial memory was significantly associated with reading comprehension through word reading. Verbal memory was associated with reading comprehension indirectly through listening comprehension. Additionally, the direct path from visuospatial memory to reading comprehension was significant when word reading and listening comprehension were considered simultaneously. The findings of the direct and unique role of visuospatial memory in reading comprehension in Chinese elaborated and extended our understanding of the simple view of reading in young children in a non-alphabetic language. Keywords Verbal memory · Visuospatial memory · Reading comprehension · Children · Chinese
Instruction The Simple View of Reading (SVR) (Hoover & Gough, 1990) states that reading comprehension is the product of two important components, word decoding and linguistic comprehension. It fails if either has deficits. Previous reading comprehension studies, based on the SVR, not only focused on identifying metalinguistic predictors (e.g., Ho, Zheng, McBride, Hsu, Waye, & Kwok, 2017; Joshi, Tao, Aaron, & Quiroz, * Dan Lin [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong
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Department of Psychology, The Education University of Hong Kong, Tai Po, Hong Kong
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J. Pan, D. Lin
2012), but also explored the fundamental cognitive skills associated uniquely with reading comprehension (e.g., Kim, 2017; Liu, Sun, Lin, Li, Yeung, & Wong, 2018). Memory is one of these crucial cognitive skills that is highly effective in predicting reading comprehension in both English (e.g., Kim, 2015, 2017) and Chinese (e.g., Leong, Tse, Loh, & Hau, 2008; McBride-Chang & Chang, 1995; Yeung, Ho, Chan, Chung, & Wong, 2013). In this article, the term “memory” refers particularly to short-term storage and/or working memory, given that the roles of both of these in young children’s reading comprehension have been stressed repeatedly. Baddeley and Hitch (1974) proposed there are two domain-specific storages (visuospatial and phonological) in working memory rather than a single one. Their seminal work spread the idea of multicomponent working memory (Baddeley, 2003; Cowan, 2017). This was accepted widely by most researchers and thus different aspects of memory were adopted in these studies (e.g., Alloway & Alloway, 2010; Alloway, Gathercole, & Pickering, 2006; Goff, Pratt, & Ong, 2005). In Chinese reading comprehension studies,
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