The Relationship Between Home Literacy Environment And Chinese Character Tuning In Children Of Lower Grade And Its Neural Mechanism

Chinese character tuning is the basis for children to achieve proficient reading.At the neural level,the N170 component has been shown to reflect the development of this process and appears steadily 1-2 years after children are trained to teach reading in schools.But some recent evidence suggests that the brain’s expertise in font processing may begin to develop as soon as children are trained to read in schools.However,the causes and mechanisms of Chinese character processing development in early schoolage children remain unclear.According to the home literacy model,the home literacy environment is divided into formal literacy activities and informal literacy activities.Formal literacy activities focus on encoding and lead directly to the written word,primarily supporting the development of decoding skills in children.Informal literacy activities focus on meaning transmission,which will expose children to the written experience incidentally and mainly support the development of children’s semantic and comprehension skills.Since most children have been exposed to reading or writing experiences to varying degrees in the family environment before they begin to receive the training of school reading teaching,one possible reason is that the early family reading and writing environment affects the emergence and development of children’s early Chinese character processing.Based on this,this study takes children in the first grade of primary school as the research object,and investigates children’s early Chinese character processing skills from the perspective of family literacy environment.In study 1,143 first-grade children and their parents were selected as subjects.Parents filled out a family literacy environment questionnaire,and children completed orthographic judgment and orthographic selection tasks.The influence of family literacy environment on children’s Chinese character processing was investigated from the perspective of behavior.The orthographic judgment task consisted of a series of real characters,pseudocharacters,noncharacters,stroke combinations and symbols,and asked the child to judge whether the stimulus presented randomly was the correct Chinese character.The orthographic selection task requires the child to choose which of the " pseudocharacter-noncharacter" pairs presented in pairs is more like the correct Chinese character.First-grade children have shown a certain ability of print tuning,and can distinguish real characters,stroke combinations and symbols well in orthographic judgment tasks,but can not distinguish pseudocharacters from noncharacters well.In orthographic selection task,children perform better in knowledge of Chinese character parts than in knowledge of parts location.Correlation analysis found that both formal and informal family literacy activities were negatively correlated with noncharacters false reporting rates.There is a significant correlation between the frequency of parents teaching children to write Chinese characters and the false alarm rate of stroke combination.All informal home literacy activities,except the frequency of reading to children by family members,were significantly negatively correlated with the false alarm rate of stroke combinations.The results of regression analysis showed that informal literacy activities had an effect on the false alarm rate of noncharacters and stroke combination.In study 2,58 first-grade children and their parents were selected to investigate the relationship between home literacy environment and neural mechanisms.Parents filled out a home literacy environment questionnaire,and children completed a visual judgment task that collected EEG data online.The task consisted of a series of real characters,pseudocharacters,noncharacters,stroke combinations and pictures of animals.The children were asked to respond to keystrokes only when presented with random pictures of animals,and not to any other stimuli.ERP results showed that real characters,pseudocharacters and noncharacters combinations triggered larger N170 than stroke combinations in both the left and right hemispheres.Further in the left hemisphere,real characters and pseudocharacters were found to trigger larger N170 than noncharacters.The correlation analysis between home literacy environment and the processing effect of N170 shows that formal literacy activities are negatively correlated with the difference waves between real characters and noncharacters in the left hemisphere.Combined with the results of the above two studies,for first-grade children,informal literacy activities have an impact on their character processing,which is further related to the neural mechanism.It can be concluded that,apart from school experience,family literacy environment is an important factor in shaping first-grade children’s print tuning ability and its neural mechanism.