On the afternoon of November 27th, as part of the Cloud Seminar Series organized by the Martin Center for Applicable Linguistics, Professor Yin Li from the Department of Foreign Languages at Tsinghua University delivered an academic lecture "Research and Reflection on the Early Development of Chinese Reading and Writing Skills" for faculty and students at the School of Foreign Languages. The seminar was hosted by Professor Xu Xu from the Martin Center.

Professor Yin first discussed the relationship between the neural basis of language and the development of reading skills, and particularly, how word or character recognition contributed to the processes of specialization of brain structures and automatization of neural circuits implicated in cognitive competence. In her talk, she focused the role of linguistic symbols in promoting cognitive breakthroughs of neural structures related to auditory, visual, and conceptual representations in the human brain. By comparing the historical evolution of human beings with the developmental process of children in mastering necessary skills of deciphering linguistic symbols, Professor Yin introduced her research topic on the formation of reading skills among young children (< 6 years old) before any formal literacy education.

Professor Yin investigated the early understanding about Chinese characters among both Chinese L1 children and Chinese L2 children. A series of experimental tasks were designed to tap into implicit statistical learning in young children, and found that children at the age of 2-3 were already able to distinguish the features of Chinese characters versus random pictures, the unique visual forms of words from their native languages, and the visual morphological features of Chinese names. Children at the age of 4-5 demonstrated sensitivity about the structure, pronunciation, component position, and meaning of Chinese characters, which had a significant predictive power on their reading and writing competence. In addition, stroke sensitivity was also found significantly related to their reading competence. Professor Yin further reported that there was no significant difference between bilingual children and Chinese monolingual children in their awareness of Chinese orthography, which seemed to play a key role in the development of early Chinese reading competence.

In the end, Professor Yin shared her more recent research on the impact of “growth” mindset on children's reading and writing competence. Research showed that, at the early stages, parents’ mindset had a greater influence on children's reading comprehension skills as well as academic achievements. With the growth of age, children's mindset started to play a larger role. More importantly, a “growth” mindset, of both parents and children, exerted a positive influence on improving reading competence.

During the Q&A session, the audience engaged in active discussion with Professor Yin about the methodological details and implications of these studies.