Dynamic Phonemic Awareness of 4-6 Years Old Chinese Children and the Predictive Effect on Character Reading Ability

This paper examines the phonemic awareness among young Chinese children through two studies. Study 1 implemented a cross-sectional design with 120 children (4-6 years old) to explore the developmental level of phonemic awareness. Study 2 monitored the longitudinal development of 127 kindergarten students in a similar age period and further fathomed the longitudinal relation between phonemic awareness and character reading ability. At 4-5 years old, performance on dynamic phoneme deletion task was significant, suggesting that phonemic awareness has already developed in preschool Chinese children and could be detected by dynamic phoneme deletion task. Children’s variance in character recognition was best explained by dynamic phoneme deletion, highlighting the importance of phonemic awareness for early character acquisition in young Chinese children. These findings have important implications for Chinese reading acquisition.