This study investigated the importance of phonological skills and visual skills in Chinese word reading and sentence comprehension among 47 Chinese second-graders. The reading scores were. found to correlate significantly with the phonological scores (rhyme detection and memory for nonrhyming Chinese characters) but not with the visual scores (spatial relations and memory for abstract designs). These findings suggest that the significance of phonological skills in early reading success is not restricted to alphabetic languages but also applies to non-alphabetic Chinese.

Key words: phonological awareness, verbal short-term memory, visual skills, reading acquisition