Facilitating effect of grapheme and syllable cues on the writing performance of children with Chinese dictation difficulties

Abstract

Spelling difficulties is referred to as dictation difficulties in China. The visual-auditory binding deficit hypothesis suggested that Chinese dictation difficulties can be correlated with deficits in binding visual and auditory information. However, how Chinese characters are mentally represented in children with dictation difficulties remained unexplored. In this study, 20 children with dictation difficulties and 18 chronically age-matched controls completed dictation tasks using grapheme cues, syllable cues, and grapheme-syllable cues. Dictation accuracy was recorded. Findings showed that under the grapheme cue condition, dictation accuracy between the two groups did not differ significantly; under the grapheme-syllable and the syllable condition, dictation accuracy in children with dictation difficulties was significantly lower compared to controls. These findings supported that the graphemic and phonological representations of Chinese characters might loosely associated in the mental lexicon of children with dictation difficulties. Intervention strategies should take into account improving their ability to associate graphemes and syllables of Chinese characters.