Character and word reading in Chinese: Why and how they should be considered uniquely vis-à-vis literacy development

Two correlational studies from the same data set demonstrated the distinctiveness of character and word reading for Chinese reading development among 337 Hong Kong Chinese children in grades 1–3. Study 1 examined the cognitive-linguistic correlates of single-character reading and two-character word reading. Rapid automatized naming, morphological awareness and visual-orthographic skill independently explained variance in both character and word...