Chinese children's early knowledge about writing

Much research on literacy development has focused on learners of alphabetic writing systems. Researchers have hypothesized that children learn about the formal characteristics of writing before they learn about the relations between units of writing and units of speech. We tested this hypothesis by examining young Chinese children's understanding of writing. Mandarin‐speaking 2‐ to 5‐year‐olds completed a graphic task, which tapped their knowledge about the formal characteristics of writing, and a phonological task, which tapped their knowledge about the correspondence between Chinese characters and syllables. The 3‐ to 5‐year‐olds performed better on the graphic task than the phonological task, indicating that learning how writing appears visually begins earlier than learning that writing corresponds to linguistic units, even in a writing system in which written units correspond to syllables. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? Learning about writing's visual form, how it looks, is an important part of emergent literacy. Knowledge of how writing symbolizes linguistic units may emerge later. What does this study add? We test the hypothesis that Chinese children learn about writing's visual form earlier than its symbolic nature. Chinese 3‐ to 5‐ year‐olds know more about visual features than character–syllable links. Results show learning of the visual appearance of a notation system is developmentally precocious.