Pinyin Invented Spelling in Mandarin Chinese-Speaking Children With and Without Reading Difficulties

This study examined analytical pinyin (a phonological coding system for teaching pronunciation and lexical tones of Chinese characters) skills in 54 Mandarin-speaking fourth graders by using an invented spelling instrument that tapped into syllable awareness, phoneme awareness, lexical tones, and tone sandhi in Chinese. Pinyin invented spelling was significantly correlated with Chinese character recognition and Chinese phonological awareness (i.e., syllable deletion and phoneme deletion). In comparison to good and average readers, poor readers performed significantly worse on the invented spelling task, and a difference was also found between average and good readers. To differentiate readers at different levels, the pinyin invented spelling task, which examined both segmental and suprasegmental elements, was superior to the typical phonological awareness task, which examined segments only. Within this new task, items involving tone sandhi (Chinese language changes in which the tones of words alter according to predetermined rules) were more difficult to manipulate than were those without tone sandhi. The findings suggest that this newly developed task may be optimal for tapping unique phonological and linguistic features in reading of Chinese and examining particular tonal difficulties in struggling Chinese readers. In addition, the results suggest that phonics manipulations within tasks of phonological and tonal awareness can alter their difficulty levels.