2. Method
2.1 Participants
Participants included 29 children (13 boys and 16 girls) in the first grade and 30 children (16 boys and 14 girls) in second grade at a primary school in Tianjin, a large industrial city in northern China. The school was located in a middle class neighborhood. The average ages were 6 years and 10 months, and 7 years and 10 months in grades one and two respectively. All the children were native speakers of Chinese and did not have any obvious cognitive or developmental delays. Since instruction of English as a foreign language began in the third grade at this school, none of the participants had been exposed to another language at school.
2.2 Measures
Rapid Automatized Naming-Digit (RAN). The child was required to name five rows of digits as quickly as possible. Each row was composed of the same 5 digits presented in a different order. Time in seconds was recorded. Children were asked to read the 5 digits before the formal test began to make sure they were familiar with the digits. None of the participants had any difficulty recognizing the 5 digits.
Syllable Deletion. The child heard a multi-syllable word, and then was asked to say how this word would sound without a certain syllable. For example, “say / shubao/ (book bag) without /shu/”, “say /dabaicai/ (cabbage) without /bai/”. The position of the target syllable varied. Pictures were provided to help children memorize the items. The task consisted of 20 items with 8 two-syllable items and 12 three-syllable items.
Rime Detection. The child was orally presented with three one-syllable words, for example, /wa/, /zhu/ and /ya/, and was asked to select the word with a different rime from the other two words. Pictures were provided to help children memorize the items. This task consisted of 16 items.
Compound Structure Task. This task required the child to identify the head of a compound noun. The child heard a description of an animal or object that did not exist in real life, and was asked to select a better name for it between two options. For example, “给穿着衣服的鱼起个名字，鱼衣和衣鱼，你看哪个更好？”(“Which is a better name for a fish that wears a dress? A fish dress or a dress fish?”). Then a second question was asked in which the head and the modifier of the compound were switched. “给鱼穿的衣服起个名字，鱼衣和衣鱼，你看哪个更好？”(“Which is a better name for the dress that a fish wears? A fish dress or a dress fish? ”). The same two options were provided for the second question. A picture with a fish wearing a dress was presented to the child to help him/her remember the sentences. This task had 14 items. Since two questions were asked for each item, the total score was 28. This task was adapted from Nagy et al. (2003), but we provided pictures to ease children’s memory burden.
Compound Analogy Task. The experimenter provided the definition of an animal or an object that was already familiar to the child, and asked the child to create a name for an imaginary animal or object that bore some resemblance to it. This task required the child to extract a morpheme from the name of the given animal or object and combine it with one or two morphemes in the description of the imaginary animal or object to create a two- or three-morpheme novel compound. For example, 斑马是身上有斑纹的一种马，那么身上有斑纹的牛我们叫什么？[Striped horse (Zebra) is a kind of horse with stripes on the body. What should we call a cow with stripes on the body?] The answer is 斑牛 (striped cow). This task was adapted from McBride-Chang’s studies (e.g. McBride-Chang et al., 2005). To reduce the effect of oral vocabulary on the performance, the items were modified so that all the definitions were familiar to children and all the answers were pseudowords. This task had 24 items.
Expressive Vocabulary. The child was asked to name pictures shown by the experimenter. A total of 120 pictures were selected from Snodgrass and Vanderwart(1980). Liu (2006) investigated the age of acquisition of the words in Snodgrass & Vanderwart (1980) among Chinese children. Age of acquisition is the age at which most of the children acquired a word or concept (Carroll & White, 1973). The words we selected for this measure were based on Liu’s (2006) results. The mean age of acquisition was 6.5 years and the range of acquisition was from 2.5 to 12 years.
Chinese Character Reading. Because no standardized reading tests were available in Chinese, we designed a character reading test by selecting characters according to their first appearances in the standard Chinese language textbooks used in primary schools (Shu, Chen, Anderson, Wu & Xuan, 2003). Our test consisted of 120 characters, with 70 characters randomly selected from grade one and two textbooks and another 40 characters from grade three to grade six textbooks. Children were asked to read all the characters in this test.
The reliabilities (Cronbach’s alpha) for the tasks are listed in Table 1. All the tasks had relatively high reliabilities.
2.3 Procedure
Children were tested in a quiet room at their school by two trained experimenters who were graduate students in a psychology department. They administered all the tests individually and recorded children’s responses. The testing was completed over two sessions. Session 1 included the two phonological awareness tasks, compound structure, and expressive vocabulary. Session 2 included rapid automatized naming, compound analogy, and character naming. Each session lasted approximately 30~40 minutes. Tasks within a session were administered in random order. Testing took place in September and October of 2004.