28th International Congress of Psychology August 8 ... - U-netSURF

cognitive abilities. The theory classifies cognitive abilities on three strata that differ by degree of
generality. However, its phenotypic form is equally important yet not readily conceptualized in
theory. This form of intelligence includes personality and temperament components that give life
to intelligence and are best observed clinically.
3006.4 Cross-cultural definitions of intelligence, J. Georgas, University of Athens, Athens,
Greece
Cultures define intelligence differently. Cognitive processes are important for adaptation to the
ecological demands of each culture. A goal of cross-cultural psychology is the search for
universals in cognitive processes across cultures, but also to explore the manifestations of
cognitive processes as shaped by different cultures. Universals represent cognitive processes that
are specific to the human species, such as encoding and decoding. These cognitive processes are
shaped by the adaptation of the individual to the ecocultural demands of the specific culture. This
theoretical approach was employed in a 16 nation study of cognitive processes with the WISC-III.
3007 INVITED SYMPOSIUM
Chinese Children’s Literacy Development
Convener and Chair: R. C. Anderson, USA
Co-convener: W. Li, USA
3007.1 Visual chunking skills in Chinese character reading and writing, R.C. Anderson 1 , W.
Li 1 , X. Chen 1 , Y. He 1 , Y. Ku 1 , H. Shu 2 , 1 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA;
2
Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
Chinese orthography consists of thousands of visually complex characters. But little is known
about the units of character perception or how insight into the geometry of Chinese characters
develops in children. The presenter will describe research showing that children as young as first
grade have some awareness of the internal structure of Chinese characters and that some of them
are beginning to encode characters in terms of chunks representing major character components.
The ability to see characters in terms of major components and subcomponents is acquired
gradually over the early elementary school years and is correlated with vocabulary knowledge,
reading comprehension, and teacher’s rating of reading level.
3007.2 Children’s use of sub-character information in reading Chinese characters, Y. He 1 , Q.
Wang 1 , R.C. Anderson 1 , H. Shu 2 , 1 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA;
2
Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
Only a small percentage of semantic-phonetic compound characters provide completely regular
and easily accessible information about pronunciation. A larger percentage of compound
characters are semi-regular in that they provide partial information about pronunciation. Two
studies will be presented that confirm that children are able to use the partial or less-accessible
information in unfamiliar tone-different characters, onset-different characters, and bound-phonetic
characters to learn the pronunciations of the characters.
3007.3 Role of Pinyin in Chinese literacy, W. Li 1 , R. C. Anderson 1 , H. Shu 2 , W. Jiang 2 ,
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