Abstract: Numerous studies of alphabetic languages suggested that memory deficits in children with literacy difficulties are pervasive across verbal items but not with visual-spatial items. Although a considerable amount of studies have investigated the importance of working memory in Chinese reading acquisition, the issue referring to discriminating different functions of phonological memory and visual memory in Chinese word reading has not been explored systematically. We thus conducted a meta-analytical review to delineate the different roles of these two types of working memory in Chinese word recognition. The results showed that: 1) working memory was consistently related to Chinese word recognition with a mean effect size around .24;2) the synthesized correlation between phonological memory and Chinese word recognition was about .34;3) the correlation between visual memory and Chinese word recognition was just.14. The findings support Wagner and Torgesen’s (1987) hypothesis of phonological processing abilities and also confirm the Universal Phonological Principle (Perfetti &Dunlap, 2008), suggesting that phonological memory is still a core engine to drive leaning to read Chinese.

摘要： 国外基于拼音文字的众多实证研究发现有阅读困难的儿童可能存在语音记忆方面的缺陷,表现为对文字信息而非视觉空间信息的存储困难。然而,关于普通儿童汉语识字能力方面,虽不少研究探讨到了工作记忆在其中的重要贡献,但目前为止依然对语音与视觉记忆在当中的角色没有一致的定论,也尚未有一篇元分析研究整合过过往的实证文献。因此,本文尝试采用元分析的方法试图澄清两种不同的工作记忆在儿童习得汉字中的不同功能。结果发现,工作记忆与儿童汉语识字能力的整体相关为0.24；语音记忆与儿童汉语识字能力的相关是0.34,而视觉记忆与儿童汉语识字能力的相关仅有0.14。本研究的结果支持以Wagner和Torgesen为代表的“泛语音论”的推测,也符合Perfetti和Dunlap(2008)的普适性的语音原则的预期,表明汉语阅读中代表着语音加工技能的语音记忆依然是汉字习得的核心驱动器。