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The script relativity hypothesis proposes that the scripts we read and write affect our cognition. The current study tested this hypothesis by comparing Chinese and English cognitive-linguistic skills and three cognitive abilities, including verbal working memory capacity, nonverbal IQ, and arithmetic calculation, across groups of children with different Chinese and English word reading performances. Using the untimed word reading performances as the criterion, four groups of children were identified from a sample of 662 Hong Kong grade 1 Chinse children, including 49 children who were "good" at both Chinese and English word reading (the GB group), 30 children who were "poor" in Chinese word reading only (the PC group), 40 children who were "poor" in English word reading only (the PE group), and 65 children who were "poor" in both (the PB group). Significant group differences were found on almost all the cognitive-linguistic skills, including phonological awareness, morphological awareness, vocabulary knowledge, and rapid digit naming, and the three cognitive abilities, with the GB group performing the best and the PB group performing the most poorly, suggesting a general positive association between script and cognition. Pairwise comparisons showed that the PC group performed better than the PE group in the English cognitive-linguistic tasks and the PE group performed better than the PC group in the Chinese cognitive-linguistic tasks, as expected. More importantly, the PC group showed poorer arithmetic calculation performance when compared to the PE group, suggesting a stronger association between Chinese word reading and arithmetic calculation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asian children, including Chinese children, perform better than their English-speaking peers in cross-national mathematics studies. This superior Asian performance is attributed to several factors including cultural beliefs, educational systems and practices, and the Chinese number naming system. Given the limited empirical evidence on pre-school mathematics learning in Chinese societies, the outcomes of Western studies are often borrowed and adopted in curriculum planning in Asian schools. The study reported in this paper investigated the performance of Hong Kong Chinese pre-school children based on Western studies involving English-speaking children, and examined the relationship between the Chinese number naming system and children's performance in number and operation concepts. Data were collected from 299 pre-school children aged between 3 and 5 years. The learning sequence of the children in mastering number and operation concepts was established using the Rasch Model. This study provides empirical evidence for the feasibility of borrowing lists of mathematics concepts from studies of English-speaking children to serve as a reference for school-based curriculum planning in a Chinese-speaking context. However, it is not enough to establish the relationship between children's performance and the Chinese number naming system. Classroom instruction and cultural beliefs in mathematics learning are also important in explaining children's performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This 13-month longitudinal study investigated whether different phonological processing components independently predicted individual differences in Chinese word reading and arithmetic. Three phonological processing skills [phonological awareness, phonological memory, and rapid automatized naming (RAN)], word reading, and arithmetic were assessed among eighty-eight Hong Kong Chinese first graders (Mean age = 79.88 months, SD = 4.71), along with vocabulary and nonverbal intelligence. These abilities were measured again at second grade (Mean age = 92.89 months, SD = 5.14). Simple correlations showed that phonological awareness and RAN at grade one were significantly associated with word reading and arithmetic both at grade one and at grade two, while phonological memory at grade one was associated with arithmetic, but not word reading, at both grades. Among the three phonological skills, RAN at grade one uniquely predicted 4% of the variance in children's reading performance and 15% of the variance in arithmetic at second grade, beyond autoregressive effects, vocabulary, and nonverbal intelligence (model 3a). In contrast, neither phonological awareness nor phonological memory significantly predicted children's later reading and arithmetic performance. There was also a reciprocal influence of Chinese word reading, rather than arithmetic skills, on later RAN performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]