Overreliance on Sublexical Phonological Processing in Visual Word Recognition for Third-Grade Mandarin-Speaking Dyslexic Children

Abstract

Developmental dyslexic (DD) children encounter challenges in sublexical orthographic, phonological, and semantic processing. However, there exists limited knowledge about the predominance of these three types of sublexical processing in visual word recognition among DD children. To investigate this issue, we screened 50 DD and 47 typically developing (TD) third-grade native Chinese-speaking children, and employed a picture-novel character mapping task. We constructed four types of options: semantic radical-legal position pseudo characters (e.g., ), phonetic radical-legal position pseudo characters (e.g., ), semantic radical-illegal position false characters (e.g., ), and phonetic radical-illegal position false characters (e.g., ). Results in the multilevel logistic mixed-effects regression analysis revealed that semantic radical-legal position pseudo characters were more predictive for the trial-level participants' response of TD children, whereas phonetic radical-legal position pseudo characters were more predictive for the trial-level participants' response of DD children. Consistently, semantic radical-legal position pseudo characters were poorer predictors, while phonetic radical-legal position pseudo characters were stronger predictors for the trial-level participants' response of DD children than for that of TD children. These findings collectively suggest the predominance of sublexical orthographic and phonological processing in DD children's visual word recognition, and DD children may rely more on the sublexical phonological processing relative to TD children.