Poor readers of Chinese respond slower than good readers in phonological, rapid naming, and interval timing tasks

The role of information processing deficits in poor readers of nonalphabetic scripts such as Chinese is not well documented. Here, we examined perceptual processing in good and poor readers of Chinese. Specifically, two groups of third grade children comprising 20 "good readers" and 19 "poor readers," drawn from a larger pool of 254 students, were tested using an auditory version of the Stop Reaction Time (Stop-RT) interval timing task, a phoneme perception task, and several measures of phonological awareness and orthographic processing. Mean Stop RTs for good readers were significantly faster than those for poor readers, and good readers were also faster in a test of rapid digit naming, but good and poor readers did not differ on measures of phoneme onset awareness or orthographic processing. Although good and poor readers did not differ in overall categorical perception of /pa5/ and /pha5/ stimuli, the good readers responded significantly faster than the poor readers. Taken together, the group differences obtained here are consistent with a slowing of information processing and behavioral output in poor readers of Chinese, rather than a loss of temporal resolution of perceptual processing.