Poetry has existed since the early development of human language. However, little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying poetry appreciation. This study explored the neural correlates of two typical types of poetry appreciation, imaginative and philosophical, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The results revealed shared activation in the left postcentral gyrus during the appreciation of both imaginative and philosophical poetry, reflecting the involvement of mental imagery and sensory aesthetic processing. Importantly, activation in the postcentral gyrus during imaginative poetry appreciation was modulated by individual imagination scores, indicating that somatosensory engagement scaled with imagery vividness. In contrast, philosophical poetry elicited stronger activation in the left middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and left insula, consistent with increased demands on semantic integration and abstract reasoning. Moreover, during the appreciation of philosophical poetry, individual philosophy scores significantly predicted activation in both the left MTG and the left insula, indicating a systematic modulation of neural responses by philosophy scores within this condition. Interestingly, the left MTG showed greater activation during the appreciation of philosophical poetry than for imaginative poetry. Furthermore, multivariate pattern analysis revealed that activation patterns in the MTG could reliably distinguish between the appreciation of imaginative and philosophical poetry. These findings provide valuable insights into the neural underpinnings of poetry appreciation and highlight the potential of fMRI in elucidating the complex interplay between literature and the brain.

Coding (Computer programming) is becoming essential across fields and argued as a new literacy for all humans. However, there is a lack of concrete understanding of the cognitive interplay between coding and natural language processing. To address this knowledge gap, this scoping review synthesized findings from 30 empirical studies examining the cognitive and neural associations between these two domains. Results indicated that over two-thirds of the studies identified significant cognitive commonalities between coding and natural language processing, while other studies emphasized mechanistic divergences. Evidence for shared mechanisms reveals that coding and natural language processing are intertwined in both cognitive and neural mechanisms. Specifically, coding significantly activates core language-related brain regions, such as inferior frontal gyrus, and evokes event-related potentials similar to those in natural language processing, particularly for grammatical and semantic hierarchical decoding. Also, the neural activation patterns of programmers change significantly with experience, gradually aligning with the neural representation patterns of natural language processing. In contrast, evidence for differential neural mechanisms highlights that coding relies predominantly on the multi-demand system rather than traditional language regions. This review highlights the crucial role of the human language system as the neural foundation for machine language processing and emphasizes the need for further research to explore the shared and distinct mechanisms between the two domains.

The current study illustrated a mediation model of different aspects of family environmental factors in predicting short-term memory and social understanding in Chinese children. The study investigated how children’s short-term memory and social understanding were predicted by family environment factors, including socioeconomic status, home crowdedness, household chaos, and the number of children’s books at home (books) among 525 children in Hong Kong and Mainland China. Data on social understanding, socioeconomic status, crowdedness, household chaos, and books were collected by parent questionnaires. Both verbal and visual short-term memory were measured individually. The results showed that the books mediated the role of crowdedness to both verbal and visual short-term memory in Mainland China, whereas in Hong Kong, crowdedness directly predicted two short-term memory with socioeconomic status controlled. Moreover, the role of crowdedness to social understanding is fully mediated by household chaos in Hong Kong and by both household chaos and books in Mainland China. Our study highlighted that manipulating soft aspects of family environmental factors (maintaining an organized, less chaotic family environment, putting more books at home) could enhance children’s fundamental short-term memory capacity and social functioning.

This study had the objective of exploring the parent–child interaction pattern during free play. The current research examined parental utterances in terms of parents’ linguistic features and the communitive functions of the language used (e.g., communication–eliciting and communication–inhibiting languages) and assessed the language production of their children during free play. As part of a larger scale study, the present research included data of 97 Hong Kong parent–child dyads, where their interaction during free play was documented through audio and video-taped recordings. The transcripts of the recording were analyzed for the lexical diversity and language complexity of parents’ and children’s utterances, and coded for the parental sensitivity and communicative functions in the parental utterances. Coding data showed that a notable number of Hong Kong parents’ utterances were direct commands and close-ended questions; these were 19.6

The study examined the mediation model of socioeconomic status (SES) and executive function (EF) on reading abilities in Chinese (as first language, L1) and English (as second language, L2) in 260 native Cantonese‐speaking students (146 boys) from Hong Kong local primary schools with the mean age at 111.3 months (range = 98–132 months). The results showed that EF was a significant mediator between SES and reading ability after controlling for age in both Chinese (L1) and English (L2). In addition to its indirect effect, SES contributed directly to reading abilities in L2 English but not in L1 Chinese in the Hong Kong Chinese learning context. This suggested that L2 learning demanded more direct family support with resources. The paper concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of the findings, especially with the evidence of reading a nonalphabetic language in a nonwestern context.

Background and Aims This study examined how parenting styles influence children's language skills and reading comprehension. Materials and Methods Six hundred and eighty-five Chinese-speaking third graders (M-age = 9.23 years, SD = .66; 341 girls) were randomly recruited from eight primary schools. We measured students' primary caregivers' parenting styles, parental education, family income, migration status, number of children's extracurricular books in the home and family cohesion at Wave 1 (i.e. grade 3). We also assessed students' reading motivation, language skills (i.e. vocabulary knowledge and syntactic awareness) and reading comprehension at Wave 2 (i.e. grade 4). Results The structural equation model analysis revealed that parenting styles indirectly affect language and reading comprehension development, with authoritative and authoritarian parenting exerting different influences on the two outcomes. Specifically, authoritative parenting was positively related to the number of children's books, which in turn was directly, or indirectly through reading motivation, associated with children's language skills and reading comprehension. In contrast, authoritarian parenting was negatively related to family cohesion, which was associated with children's reading motivation, and consequently, their language skills and reading comprehension. The multigroup analysis showed that the indirect pathways varied slightly across parental migration statuses. Discussion and Conclusion These findings enhance the global understanding of the pathways linking parenting styles to children's language skills and reading comprehension, suggesting that educators and researchers should not overly emphasize the direct role of parenting styles in children's academic performance.

There is considerable evidence that word reading in Chinese is predicted by morphological awareness. However, does learning to read contribute conversely to the later development of morphological awareness in Chinese? This two-year longitudinal study of Chinese children from Beijing and Hong Kong demonstrated that word reading predicted morphological awareness in Chinese. The findings from a latent growth curve analysis suggested that both the initial level and the growth rate of word reading predicted morphological awareness, with phonological awareness statistically controlled across the two Chinese-speaking societies. However, the association patterns were slightly different in the two cities. In Beijing, phonological awareness was found to partially mediate the prediction of reading growth in morphological awareness, but this mediation effect was not found in Hong Kong. Overall, these findings highlight the importance of early reading experience in the development of morphological awareness in Chinese children across different Chinese-speaking societies.

BackgroundResearch on drawing has focused primarily on science texts as the learning materials, with relatively limited studies conducted in the humanities or other disciplines. This lack of diversity may restrict the generalizability of the observed drawing effect.AimPoems were a type of highly visualizable and condensed humanities texts, differing largely from the science materials. This study examined an under-explored topic for the effects of drawing on learning poems, as compared to reading, writing, and explaining strategies.SamplesParticipants were 60 college students in Experiment 1, and 89 college students in Experiment 2.MethodsIn Experiment 1, students learned poems by picture drawing as a constructive-mode activity, and repeated reading and verbatim writing as active-mode activities. In Experiment 2, students drew pictures and explained meanings of the poems as constructive-mode activities.ResultsThe immediate performance and motivation after learning in the drawing strategy were higher than those in the reading and writing strategies. Students showed lower decreases from immediate to delayed performance and higher scores of motivation rating for the drawing strategy than for the explaining strategy, although the immediate performance with the drawing strategy was not as good as that with the explaining strategy.ConclusionsThe utilization of drawing strategy demonstrated its potential in facilitating learning poems. With the evidence of learning poems, this study contributed to our understanding of the interactive, constructive, active, and passive (ICAP) framework by highlighting its cross-mode superiority, and additionally elaborated different learning effects of the strategies within the same parallel mode.

In this study, we examined the relationship between phonological awareness (PA), morphological awareness (MA), and character reading in Chinese kindergarten children. One hundred and twenty children were assessed in each of their three years at the kindergarten, with 12-month intervals in between. Using cross-lagged panel modeling, we found that: (1) from Time 1 to Time 2, character reading predicted PA and MA, and PA negatively predicted illiteracy; (2) from Time 2 to Time 3, MA predicted PA and character reading; (3) significant autoregressive effects were found in all three main variables at the two time intervals. The results indicated the benefits of reading experience to the development of oral language skills and the pivotal role of MA in both reading and oral language skills in Chinese early readers.

In this study, we investigated the direct and indirect associations of different cognitive-linguistic skills and Chinese reading comprehension in Hong Kong kindergarteners. We assessed 179 children's nonverbal IQ, cognitive-linguistic skills, word reading, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension. Results showed significant correlations between all variables and reading comprehension. Further path analysis results indicated that rapid automatized naming, orthographic knowledge, and morphological awareness contributed to reading comprehension via word reading. Nonverbal IQ and vocabulary knowledge were associated with reading comprehension through listening comprehension. Beyond that, nonverbal IQ and morphological awareness still contributed directly to reading comprehension. Overall, our findings elucidated the importance of nonverbal IQ and cognitive-linguistic skills within the framework of the simple view of reading in Chinese and highlighted the unique roles of nonverbal IQ and meaning-related skills in Chinese reading comprehension, which contributed to understanding the simple view of reading in Chinese.

This study investigated the direct and indirect associations of different executive function skills with Chinese word reading and writing. A total of 213 Cantonese-speaking kindergarteners (97 girls, mean age = 73.3 months) participated in this study. Their working memory, inhibition control, cognitive flexibility, orthographic knowledge, morphological awareness, word reading, and word writing were assessed. The results showed that working memory significantly explained word reading and writing through orthographic knowledge, and morphological awareness, respectively. Beyond that, working memory still predicted word writing directly. The direct path from inhibition control to word writing was also significant. Moreover, inhibition control played a significant indirect role in word reading and writing via morphological awareness. However, cognitive flexibility was only associated with word reading directly in this model. The findings highlighted the respective roles of executive function skills in early Chinese reading and writing. This helps to elucidate the important executive function skills needed for Chinese reading and writing.

While recent studies find that contextual diversity (CD) is a better determinant of visual word recognition than token frequency, there is a dearth of work comparing contextual diversity and token frequency in developing readers. In two sets of character and lexical decision experiments we examined token frequency and contextual diversity effects for fourth-grade children in Chinese. Experiments 1a and 1b used Chinese characters and words from SUBTLEX-CH. Experiments 2a and 2b used characters and words from a new corpus developed from Chinese primary school textbooks and reading materials from Grade 1 to 4. In both sets of experiments, CD affected character and lexical decision times but token frequency did not. The results are discussed in terms of recent context-based accounts of word learning and lexical processing, and implications are presented for models of skilled and developing reading.

In this study, we examined the effects of phonological awareness (PA), morphological awareness (MA), two character properties (family size [i.e., the number of words that contain the character] and frequency), and the interactions between the metalinguistic awareness (i.e., PA and MA) and the character properties on character reading in early Chinese readers. In total, 206 kindergarten children from China (118 from Mainland China and 88 from Hong Kong) were tracked from the second year of kindergarten to the third year. The linear mixed-effects models revealed significant main effects of metalinguistic awareness and character properties and significant interaction effects between these two, especially for the children from Mainland China. Specifically, the interaction effects indicated that early Chinese readers were able to use metalinguistic awareness more when reading the characters with more favorable properties (i.e., large family sizes and high frequencies). The results suggest a synergistic relationship between metalinguistic awareness and character properties for character learning in early Chinese readers.

Expert face recognition has long been marked by holistic processing. Hence, due to the many visual properties shared between face perception and Chinese characters, it has been suggested that Chinese character recognition may induce stronger holistic processing in expert readers than in novices. However, there have been different viewpoints presented about Chinese character recognition, one of which suggests that expertise in this skill involved reduced holistic processing which may be modulated by writing experiences/performances. In this study we examined holistic processing in Chinese character recognition in adults with and without dyslexia, using the complete composite paradigm. Our results showed that the adults with dyslexia recognized Chinese characters with a stronger holistic processing effect than the typical controls. It seems that those with dyslexia relied overly on the visual spatial information of characters and showed deficits in attending selectively to their components when processing Chinese characters, which hindered the development of expert reading and writing skills. This effect was in contrast to previous perceptual expertise studies in which reduced holistic processing marked deficits in face/visual object recognition. This study is also the first to show that Chinese adults with dyslexia had persistent below average performances in Chinese literacy.

This study investigated the direct and indirect roles of verbal and visuospatial memory in Chinese reading comprehension. One hundred twenty-eight Cantonese-speaking children participated in the study at the end of their 3rd year of kindergarten in Hong Kong. Both verbal and visuospatial memory were found to be significantly associated with Chinese reading comprehension. Path analysis showed that visuospatial memory was significantly associated with reading comprehension through word reading. Verbal memory was associated with reading comprehension indirectly through listening comprehension. Additionally, the direct path from visuospatial memory to reading comprehension was significant when word reading and listening comprehension were considered simultaneously. The findings of the direct and unique role of visuospatial memory in reading comprehension in Chinese elaborated and extended our understanding of the simple view of reading in young children in a non-alphabetic language.

BACKGROUND:Word reading and linguistic comprehension skills are two crucial components in reading comprehension, according to the Simple View of Reading (SVR). Some researchers have posited that a third component should be involved in reading and understanding texts, namely executive function (EF) skills.AIM:This study was novel in two ways. Not only did we tested EF skills as a predictor of reading comprehension in a non-alphabetic language (i.e., Chinese) to extend the theoretical model of SVR, we also examined reading comprehension further in kindergarten children (age 5) in Hong Kong, in the attempt to reveal possible early precursors of reading comprehension.SAMPLE(S):A group of 170 K3 kindergarteners was recruited in Hong Kong.METHODS:Children's word reading was assessed. Their linguistic comprehension was assessed with phonological awareness, verbal short-term memory, and vocabulary knowledge. Using a structured observation task, Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders (HTKS), we measured their composite scores for EF skills.RESULTS:Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders performance predicted unique variance in children's Chinese reading comprehension concurrently beyond word reading and a set of linguistic comprehension skills.CONCLUSIONS:The results highlight the important role of EF skills in beginning readers' reading comprehension.

Storybook reading is the major source of literacy exposure for beginning readers. The present study tracked 4-year-old Chinese children’s eye movements while they were reading simulated storybook pages. Their eye-movement patterns were examined in relation to their word learning gains. The same reading list, consisting of 20 two-character Chinese words, was used in the pretest, 5-min eye-tracking learning session, and posttest. Additionally, visual spatial skill and phonological awareness were assessed in the pretest as cognitive controls. The results showed that the children’s attention was attracted quickly by pictures, on which their attention was focused most, with only 13% of the time looking at words. Moreover, significant learning gains in word reading were observed, from the pretest to posttest, from 5-min exposure to simulated storybook pages with words, picture and pronunciation of two-character words present. Furthermore, the children’s attention to words significantly predicted posttest reading beyond socioeconomic status, age, visual spatial skill, phonological awareness and pretest reading performance. This eye-movement evidence of storybook reading by children as young as four years, reading a non-alphabetic script (i.e., Chinese), has demonstrated exciting findings that children can learn words effectively with minimal exposure and little instruction; these findings suggest that learning to read requires attention to the basic words itself. The study contributes to our understanding of early reading acquisition with eye-movement evidence from beginning readers.

Word reading and linguistic comprehension skills are two crucial components in reading comprehension, according to the Simple View of Reading (SVR). Some researchers have posited that a third component should be involved in reading and understanding texts, namely executive function (EF) skills. This study was novel in two ways. Not only did we tested EF skills as a predictor of reading comprehension in a non-alphabetic language (i.e., Chinese) to extend the theoretical model of SVR, we also examined reading comprehension further in kindergarten children (age 5) in Hong Kong, in the attempt to reveal possible early precursors of reading comprehension. A group of 170 K3 kindergarteners was recruited in Hong Kong. Children's word reading was assessed. Their linguistic comprehension was assessed with phonological awareness, verbal short-term memory, and vocabulary knowledge. Using a structured observation task, Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders (HTKS), we measured their composite scores for EF skills. Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders performance predicted unique variance in children's Chinese reading comprehension concurrently beyond word reading and a set of linguistic comprehension skills. The results highlight the important role of EF skills in beginning readers’ reading comprehension.

This longitudinal study examined the developmental trajectory of English expressive vocabulary and its relationship to English word reading in a sample of 141 Hong Kong children learning English as a second language (ESL). The children were observed six times at 3-month intervals over 15months, from the spring of their second year of kindergarten (K2) to the end of their third year (K3). The development of English expressive vocabulary was nonlinear during the assessment period. With age, nonverbal IQ, English phonological awareness, letter knowledge and Chinese character reading controlled, the initial level of expressive vocabulary predicted English word reading 15months later. More importantly, the expressive vocabulary growth rate during the 15months also predicted English word reading. Our findings underscore the predictive power of the growth trajectory of expressive vocabulary in Hong Kong ESL children. Practical implications of the study are discussed.