While research has established a close relationship between children’s oral vocabulary and reading ability in Chinese, the nature of this relationship is not clear. This study aims to examine if vocabulary knowledge of Chinese words facilitates learning novel orthographic forms during independent reading. We also investigate whether such oral vocabulary is to complement phonological decoding, which has been considered the primary underpinning of orthographic learning, or whether it makes a unique contribution to the acquisition of novel orthographic representations in Chinese. Data from two studies (Li et al. in Cognition 176:184–194, 2018; Li et al. in Sci Stud Read. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2020.1781863) were re-analysed (total N = 164). In these studies, children learned the oral vocabulary of some novel Chinese words and subsequently saw their written forms as pseudocharacters in short stories. The phonetic regularity of the pseudocharacters was manipulated such that half of them could be reliably decoded via the phonetic radical (regular) and the other half could not (irregular). The results showed that oral vocabulary learning was significantly associated with orthographic learning and pseudocharacter reading in natural text. Importantly, item-specific oral vocabulary knowledge predicted the success of orthographic learning and reading accuracy of both regular and irregular pseudocharacters. These results provide evidence that oral vocabulary makes a unique contribution to children’s orthographic learning in Chinese during independent reading.

尽管研究已经建立了儿童口语词汇和中文阅读能力之间的密切关系，但这种关系的性质尚不清楚。这项研究的目的是检验汉语单词的词汇知识是否有助于在独立阅读过程中学习新颖的拼字形式。我们还研究了这种口头词汇是否是对语音学解码的补充（语音学解码已被视为正交学的主要基础），或者它是否对获取中文中新颖的正交学表示形式做出了独特的贡献。重新分析了两项研究的数据（Li等人在Cognition 176：184-194，2018; Li等人在Sci Stud Read.https：//doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2020.1781863）（总N = 164）。在这些研究中，孩子们学习了一些新颖的汉语单词的口头词汇，随后将他们的书面形式看作是短篇小说中的假字符。对伪字符的语音规则进行了操纵，以使它们中的一半可以通过语音根（常规）可靠地解码，而另一半则不能（不规则）解码。结果表明，自然语言中的口语词汇学习与拼字学习和假字符阅读密切相关。重要的是，特定于项目的口语词汇知识可以预测正则和不规则假字符的正字法学习和阅读准确性的成功。这些结果提供了证据，表明在独立阅读过程中，口语词汇对儿童汉语拼字学习有独特的贡献。