The role of phonological and morphological awareness in early Chinese reading of young children who are deaf or hard of hearing in Taiwan

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the role of two important metalinguistic skills; i.e., phonological awareness and morphological awareness, in early Chinese reading of young children that were deaf or hard of hearing. This study adopted a pre-post intervention design to examine the effects of phonological awareness and morphological awareness training on early Chinese reading. Three groups of children who were deaf and either used typical forms of hearing amplification or cochlear implants received different treatment conditions with respect to instruction on certain bottom-up knowledge with regard to Chinese, i.e. phonological awareness training only (PA group), morphological awareness training only (MA group), and phonological plus morphological awareness training (PAMA group). The control group adhered to the conventional intervention curriculum for young children who were deaf or hard of hearing in Taiwan.;The results indicated that PA group outperformed the other three groups in terms of phonological awareness, and the MA group outperformed the PA and Control group in terms of morphological awareness. In addition, the PAMA group also outperformed the Control group in MA. There were statistically significant differences between the PA and Control group and between the MA and Control group regarding the performance of sentence reading.;When the study compared children with different hearing devices, there were no statistically significant differences between two groups in terms of the post performance on any dependent measures; nor were there interactions between different type of hearing device used and type of intervention group membership.;Alternatively, specifically targeted PA or MA treatment condition had a vital influence on children's posttest sentence reading measures, and moreover, these forms of experimental training had significant effects on the metalinguistic awareness of preschool children in the area in which they were specifically taught. Interestingly, however, the composite instruction of PA plus MA did not have statistically significant effects on sentence reading ability but on MA only.