1. The role of home literacy environment in listening comprehension and word reading in Chinese
According to the “Simple View of Reading” (SVR; Gough & Tunmer, Reference Gough and Tunmer1986; Hoover & Tunmer, Reference Hoover and Tunmer2022), reading comprehension is the product of decoding (most often operationalized with word reading tasks) and linguistic comprehension (most often operationalized with listening comprehension tasks). For a child to be a good comprehender, both decoding and linguistic comprehension are necessary. Evidence in support of the SVR has been provided in many languages around the world (see Florit & Cain, Reference Florit and Cain2011; Ripoll Salceda et al., Reference Ripoll Salceda, Alonso and Castilla-Earls2014, for meta-analytic and systematic reviews). In another influential theoretical account, the Home Literacy Model, Sénéchal and LeFevre (Reference Sénéchal and LeFevre2002, Reference Sénéchal and LeFevre2014) proposed that direct teaching of letters/words at home influences reading comprehension through the effects of letter knowledge and/or word reading and that shared book reading influences comprehension through the effects of vocabulary. Despite the fact that vocabulary is a strong predictor of listening comprehension (Wolf et al., Reference Wolf, Muijselaar, Boonstra and de Bree2019), few studies to date have examined the possible effects of different HLE aspects on listening comprehension. Given that children first understand spoken language prior to understanding written language and that many HLE activities involve talking about words and discussing the meaning of different stories, it is critical to know what aspects of HLE (if any) predict listening comprehension over and above those that predict word reading. This will help us further refine the existing theoretical accounts of HLE and how it relates to reading comprehension. In light of this, the present study investigated the role of HLE in listening comprehension and word reading, the two key components of the SVR, in Chinese kindergarten children.
1.1. Home literacy environment and early literacy skills
According to one of the most popular theoretical accounts of HLE, the Home Literacy Model (HLM; Sénéchal & LeFevre, Reference Sénéchal and LeFevre2002), home literacy activities can be grouped into two broad categories: code-related (formal) and meaning-related (informal) activities. These two categories of activities influence word reading and reading comprehension through different pathways. Code-related activities are expected to predict word reading through the effects of letter knowledge; a prediction that has been confirmed by several previous studies (e.g., Manolitsis et al., Reference Manolitsis, Georgiou and Parrila2011; Silinskas et al., Reference Silinskas, Torppa, Lerkkanen and Nurmi2020). In turn, meaning-related activities are expected to predict word reading and reading comprehension through the effects of vocabulary; a prediction that has also been confirmed (e.g., Hood et al., Reference Hood, Conlon and Andrews2008; Silinskas et al., Reference Silinskas, Torppa, Lerkkanen and Nurmi2020). Recently, researchers have also shown that access to literacy resources (measured by asking parents to indicate how many children’s books they have at home) makes an independent contribution to word reading and reading comprehension over and above the effects of code- and meaning-related activities (e.g., Inoue et al., Reference Inoue, Manolitsis, de Jong, Landerl, Parrila and Georgiou2020).
Given the marked differences of the Chinese language (e.g., syllable-based phonology and visually complex orthography; Hanley, Reference Hanley, Snowling and Hulme2005) and cultural context (e.g., influences of Confucian principles; Ng et al., Reference Ng, Pomerantz and Deng2014) compared to Western languages and cultures, one might expect that studies in Chinese would present a different picture than findings from other countries and cultures. However, contrary to this prediction, studies on HLE in China have generally replicated similar findings to those reported in Western societies (e.g., Inoue et al., Reference Inoue, Zhang, Su, Meng, Shu and Georgiou2025; Liu et al., Reference Liu, Georgiou and Manolitsis2018; Zhang et al., Reference Zhang, Inoue, Shu and Georgiou2020, Reference Zhang, Inoue, Cao, Li and Georgiou2023), except that the role of meaning-related HLE has been inconsistent. For example, Inoue et al. (Reference Inoue, Zhang, Su, Meng, Shu and Georgiou2025) showed that parental teaching (code-related HLE) and access to literacy resources, but not meaning-related HLE, were independently associated with children’s emergent literacy skills (pinyin letter knowledge, phonological awareness, and vocabulary) after controlling for the effects of parental socioeconomic status, attitudes, and expectations across socioeconomic contexts in China.
Despite the documented role of HLE in children’s language and literacy skills (see de Bondt et al., Reference de Bondt, Willenberg and Bus2020; Noble et al., Reference Noble, Sala, Peter, Lingwood, Rowland, Gobet and Pine2019, for evidence from meta-analyses), very little is known about the contribution of HLE to listening comprehension. Only a handful of studies have included measures of listening comprehension along with HLE (de Jong & Leseman, Reference de Jong and Leseman2001; Puglisi et al., Reference Puglisi, Hulme, Hamilton and Snowling2017; Sénéchal et al., Reference Sénéchal, LeFevre, Thomas and Daley1998; Strasser et al., Reference Strasser, Vergara and Río2017; Wirth et al., Reference Wirth, Ehmig and Niklas2021) and none have tested how the different aspects of HLM predict listening comprehension, particularly in a model that also includes word reading. This is surprising given the prominence of the SVR (Gough & Tunmer, Reference Gough and Tunmer1986; Hoover & Tunmer, Reference Hoover and Tunmer2022) in the literature, which includes listening comprehension as a key determinant of reading comprehension, along with word reading. Listening comprehension has also been shown to provide a critical foundation for early literacy acquisition across different languages (e.g., Hjetland et al., Reference Hjetland, Brinchmann, Scherer, Hulme and Melby-Lervåg2020; Hulme et al., Reference Hulme, Nash, Gooch, Lervåg and Snowling2015), including Chinese (e.g., Li et al., Reference Li, Zhu and Wu2021; Pan & Lin, Reference Pan and Lin2022). Therefore, it is important to identify the role of different aspects of HLE in both word reading and listening comprehension as child outcomes.
In one of the early studies on HLE, Sénéchal et al. (Reference Sénéchal, LeFevre, Thomas and Daley1998) examined the relations between code- and meaning-related HLE and children’s oral- and written-language skills. They created an oral-language factor from measures of vocabulary, phonological awareness, and listening comprehension, and found that storybook exposure (an indicator of meaning-related HLE) was a significant predictor of that factor, but parents’ teaching of words was not. Unfortunately, because the scores in listening comprehension were amalgamated with those of vocabulary and phonological awareness, we do not know how well the HLE aspects would predict listening comprehension alone. de Jong and Leseman (Reference de Jong and Leseman2001) also examined the relations of opportunity (frequency of shared book reading and number of children’s books) and instructional quality (quality of parental guidance during literacy interactions with their children) with listening comprehension in Grade 1 Dutch children. They reported significant correlations with instructional quality (r = .25), but not with opportunity (r = .03), which is surprising given that shared book-reading activities engage children in conversations about the stories they heard. Unfortunately, listening comprehension was subsequently used to predict reading comprehension and not as an outcome measure. Finally, in a study with Grade 1 Chilean children, Strasser et al. (Reference Strasser, Vergara and Río2017) found that print exposure (measured by asking children to name the book by showing them the front page) was a significant predictor of listening comprehension along with vocabulary and that listening comprehension and word reading mediated the effects of print exposure on Grade 1 reading comprehension. Unfortunately, this study did not include any measures of code-related HLE or access to literacy resources.
1.2. The present study
The purpose of the present study was to examine the direct and indirect effects of three aspects of HLE (code- and meaning-related HLE and access to literacy resources) on listening comprehension and word reading in a sample of Chinese kindergarten children. On the basis of the findings of previous studies in Chinese and other languages (e.g., Inoue et al., Reference Inoue, Manolitsis, de Jong, Landerl, Parrila and Georgiou2020, Reference Inoue, Zhang, Su, Meng, Shu and Georgiou2025; Zhang et al., Reference Zhang, Inoue, Shu and Georgiou2020, Reference Zhang, Inoue, Cao, Li and Georgiou2023), we expected that code-related HLE would predict word reading through the effects of pinyin letter knowledge (the phonetic script in Chinese) and that access to literacy resources would predict word reading through the effects of vocabulary and phonological awareness. Finally, we expected that access to literacy resources would predict listening comprehension through the effects of vocabulary and phonological awareness.
2. Method
2.1. Participants
Our study included a total of 347 children (172 boys and 175 girls; mean age = 74.01 months, SD = 3.62) who were recruited from three kindergartens in Tianshui city, Gansu province, China. All children were native Mandarin speakers, and none were diagnosed with any intellectual, behavioural, or sensory deficits (based on parents’ and teachers’ reports). Parental consent was obtained prior to testing. Ethics approval was also obtained from the Survey and Behavioural Research Ethics Committee of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Reference No. SBRE-22-0705).
Parents also participated in the study by filling out a questionnaire on (a) their educational attainment and monthly income, (b) code- and meaning-related HLE, and (c) the number of children’s books at home (Table 1). The median and mode of education level of mothers and fathers was “technical secondary school or college”; the average monthly income of parents was between 6,000 and 9,000 Chinese Yuan (RMB), approximately 820 and 1,230 United States Dollars (USD). Overall, both indices of parental SES suggest that our sample was representative of the general population in Gansu (Gansu Province Bureau of Statistics, 2023).
Table 1. Descriptive statistics of the parent variables. The n in some variables is lower than in others because some parents did not answer that question
2.2. Measures
2.2.1. Socioeconomic status (control variables)
Parental education
Parents were asked to report their highest level of education on a 7-point scale ranging from a third-grade education or less to a completed graduate degree (master’s or doctorate). A composite score for parental education was calculated by averaging the z-scores for mothers’ and fathers’ education. The correlation between them in our sample was .75.
Family income
Parents were asked to report the family’s monthly income on a 10-point scale ranging from less than 3,000 Chinese yuan (RMB) (approximately 410 USD) per month to more than 27,000 (approximately 3,690 USD) per month. The options were determined based on the most recent census (National Bureau of Statistics in China, 2023).
2.2.2. Home literacy environment
To assess HLE, we sent a short questionnaire to the parents of the children who were participating in this study. The questionnaire included a total of eight items that were sampled from previous studies on HLE in Chinese (e.g., Liu et al., Reference Liu, Georgiou and Manolitsis2018; Zhang et al., Reference Zhang, Inoue, Shu and Georgiou2020). Previous studies have reported strong correlations between these items and other measures of code- and meaning-related HLE, such as the Title/Author Recognition Checklists or the diary of shared book reading at home (Zhang et al., Reference Zhang, Georgiou, Xu, Liu, Li and Shu2018, Reference Zhang, Inoue, Shu and Georgiou2020).
Code-related home literacy experiences
Parents were asked to think of a typical week in the past school year (while their child was in the third year of kindergarten) and indicate on a 5-point Likert scale the frequency of teaching their children (a) to read Chinese characters, (b) to read pinyin, (c) to write Chinese characters, and (d) to recognize radicals. The Likert scale ranged from 1 = never to 5 = every day. A composite score for code-related HLE was calculated by averaging the z-scores of the four items. Cronbach’s alpha in our sample was .75.
Meaning-related home literacy experiences
Parents were asked to think of a typical week in the past year and indicate on a 5-point Likert scale the frequency of (a) reading a story to their child at bedtime, (b) reading a story to their child at other times, and (c) discussing different stories with their child. The Likert scale ranged from 1 = never to 5 = every day. A composite score for meaning-related HLE was calculated by averaging the z-scores of the three items. Cronbach’s alpha in our sample was .84.
Access to Literacy Resources
Parents were asked to report how many children’s books they had at home and then coded the reported number on a 7-point scale: 1 = none, 2 = 1–20, 3 = 21–40, 4 = 41–60, 5 = 61–80, 6 = 81–100, and 7 = more than 100 books (see Zhang et al., Reference Zhang, Inoue, Shu and Georgiou2020, Reference Zhang, Inoue, Zhang, Jin and Georgiou2024).
2.2.3. Emergent Literacy Skills, Word Reading, and Listening Comprehension (Child Outcomes)
Pinyin Knowledge
The pinyin letter knowledge task (Zhang et al., Reference Zhang, Inoue, Cao, Li and Georgiou2023) was used. Children were asked to read 18 pinyin letters (k, m, a, h, p, f, u, c, t, i, g, s, b, e, ü, o, d, and w) that were printed on a sheet of paper. Each item was scored as correct (1) or incorrect (0) for a total of 18 points. Cronbach’s alpha in our sample was .96.
Phonological Awareness
The syllable deletion task (Li et al., Reference Li, Shu, McBride-Chang, Liu and Peng2012) was used. This task has been widely used in previous studies on Chinese literacy development and has been shown to play an important role in predicting word reading in young Chinese children (see Ruan et al., Reference Ruan, Georgiou, Song, Li and Shu2018; Song et al., Reference Song, Georgiou, Su and Shu2016, for evidence from meta-analyses). Children were asked to say what was left in a two- or three-syllable word after deleting one of the syllables (e.g., Say /huǒ chē/ ‘train’. Now say /huǒ chē/ without /huǒ/ would be /chē/ ‘vehicle’). The task was discontinued after five consecutive errors, and a child’s score was the total number of correct answers (max = 20). Cronbach’s alpha in our sample was .89.
Vocabulary
A Chinese adaptation of the Word Definitions task (Zhang et al., Reference Zhang, Inoue, Shu and Georgiou2020) from the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale (Thorndike et al., Reference Thorndike, Hagen and Sattler1986) was used. This task has been widely used in previous studies on early language and literacy development in Chinese (e.g., Inoue et al., Reference Inoue, Zhang, Su, Meng, Shu and Georgiou2025; Zhang et al., Reference Zhang, Georgiou, Xu, Liu, Li and Shu2018, Reference Zhang, Inoue, Cao, Li and Georgiou2023), demonstrating its reliability and validity. Children were asked to define orally presented words in their own words. A complete definition had to include the proper semantic category of the provided word and one or more features of the word for a maximum of two points per item (e.g., for the target word “holiday,” a 2-point answer would be ‘leisure time away from work/school’ and a 1-point answer would be ‘no school or playtime’). The task consisted of two practice items and 32 test items that were arranged in increasing difficulty. Testing was discontinued after five consecutive errors, and the maximum score was 64. Cronbach’s alpha in our sample was .86.
Word Reading
The single-character recognition task (Li et al., Reference Li, Shu, McBride-Chang, Liu and Peng2012) was used. Children were asked to read aloud 60 single-character Chinese words, which were arranged in increasing difficulty. The task was discontinued after six consecutive errors, and a child’s score was the total number of correctly read characters. Cronbach’s alpha in our sample was .98.
Listening Comprehension
A Chinese adaptation of the Listening Comprehension task from GRADE (Group Reading Assessment and Diagnostic Evaluation; Williams, Reference Williams2001) was used. Children were asked to listen to a sentence and then select the picture from four options on a sheet of paper that matched the meaning of the sentence. A child’s score was the total number of correct answers (max = 21). Cronbach’s alpha in our sample was .80.
2.3. Procedure
Testing took place between May and June (9–10 months after the start of the school year). All tasks were administered during school hours by trained research assistants with experience in psychoeducational assessments. All children completed the tasks in one session, which lasted approximately 40 min. Parents completed the questionnaire at the same time as their children’s testing.
2.4. Statistical Analysis
To examine the relationship between HLE aspects and child outcomes, we conducted a path analysis, as shown in Figure 1. The model reflects our hypotheses presented in the Introduction. In addition, we included in the model the direct paths from the SES variables to child outcomes and from the HLE variables to word reading and listening comprehension; this allowed us to test the associations between HLE and child outcomes in a more conservative manner by controlling for potential confounding by the SES and HLE variables. Next, we conducted a mediation analysis to examine the indirect effects of HLE aspects on listening comprehension and word reading. We calculated bias-corrected confidence intervals (CIs) for the indirect effects using a bootstrapping technique with 5,000 resamples and used them to test for statistical significance at the alpha level of .05 (Hayes, Reference Hayes2022).
Figure 1. The model for the relationship between home literacy environment and child outcomes (standardized estimates). Solid lines indicate significant paths and dashed lines indicate nonsignificant paths. Paths from SES (control) variables to all HLE and child variables were estimated to control for their confounding effects, but are not shown for clarity. Full model results are available at https://osf.io/gau7s/. *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001.
All data, analysis codes, and full model results are available on our Open Science Framework (OSF) project page at https://osf.io/gau7s/.
3. Results
Tables 1 and 2 show the descriptive statistics for the parent and child variables, respectively. Family income and children’s word reading were positively skewed; a square root transformation was used to normalize their distributions prior to further analyses (Tabachnick & Fidell, Reference Tabachnick and Fidell2018). Table 3 shows a correlation matrix for all variables. While code-related HLE was correlated with pinyin knowledge, access to literacy resources was correlated with phonological awareness, vocabulary, word reading, and listening comprehension.
Table 2. Descriptive statistics of the child variables
Table 3. Correlations between the variables
*p < .05; **p < .01
Figure 1 shows a summary of the model results. The model fitted the data very well, χ2 = 4.97, df = 5, p = .420, CFI = 1.00, RMSEA = .000, 90% CI [.000, .075], SRMR = .013, and accounted for 32% of the variance in word reading and 26% of the variance in listening comprehension. Code-related HLE was associated with pinyin knowledge, and access to literacy resources was associated with phonological awareness and vocabulary after controlling for the effects of parental education and family income. In turn, phonological awareness and vocabulary were associated with both word reading and listening comprehension after controlling for the effects of the SES and HLE variables.
Finally, Table 4 shows the indirect effects of HLE aspects on word reading and listening comprehension. Of the three aspects of HLE, only access to literacy resources had a significant indirect effect on both child outcomes over and above the effects of parental education and family income. While the indirect effect of access to literacy resources on word reading was mediated by phonological awareness, the indirect effect of access to literacy resources on listening comprehension was mediated by phonological awareness and vocabulary.
Table 4. Indirect effects of home literacy environment on word reading and listening comprehension. Bold font indicates significant indirect effects. CHLE = code-related HLE; MHLE = meaning-related HLE; ALR = access to literacy resources; PK = pinyin knowledge; PA = phonological awareness; DV = dependent variables
4. Discussion
The purpose of this study was to examine the direct and indirect effects of three aspects of HLE (code- and meaning-related HLE and access to literacy resources) on listening comprehension and word reading, the two components of the Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, Reference Gough and Tunmer1986; Hoover & Tunmer, Reference Hoover and Tunmer2022), in a sample of Chinese kindergarten children. Our results showed first that code-related HLE was associated with pinyin knowledge after controlling for parental education, family income, and the other aspects of HLE. This is consistent with the premise of the Home Literacy Model (Sénéchal & LeFevre, Reference Sénéchal and LeFevre2002) and findings from previous HLE studies in Chinese (e.g., Inoue et al., Reference Inoue, Zhang and Georgiou2022; Liu et al., Reference Liu, Georgiou and Manolitsis2018; Zhang et al., Reference Zhang, Inoue, Shu and Georgiou2020). However, pinyin knowledge was not independently associated with word reading in our sample. This may be due to the strong effect of phonological awareness on word reading, which may have masked the potential effect of pinyin knowledge on word reading among children in our sample who were still in the initial phase of reading development.
In turn, access to literacy resources was associated with phonological awareness and vocabulary, and through their effects, with word reading and listening comprehension. Our findings add to the limited literature examining the role of HLE in listening comprehension (de Jong & Leseman, Reference de Jong and Leseman2001; Puglisi et al., Reference Puglisi, Hulme, Hamilton and Snowling2017; Sénéchal et al., Reference Sénéchal, LeFevre, Thomas and Daley1998; Wirth et al., Reference Wirth, Ehmig and Niklas2021) and suggest that listening comprehension could be an additional component in the Home Literacy Model. Because print materials can expose children to more sophisticated vocabulary (Dawson et al., Reference Dawson, Hsiao, Tan, Banerji and Nation2021) and help them recognize the phonological components of words (e.g., B for bear; Brabham et al., Reference Brabham, Murray and Bowden2006; Murray et al., Reference Murray, Stahl and Ivey1996), their vocabulary and phonological awareness are likely to improve; this, in turn, may be beneficial not only for early word reading but also for listening comprehension (e.g., Mullis et al., Reference Mullis, Martin, Foy and Drucker2012; see also Nation et al., Reference Nation, Dawson and Hsiao2022, for a relevant discussion).
Even though we tested both the direct and indirect effects of HLE aspects on word reading and listening comprehension simultaneously, our results indicated that all of their effects were fully mediated by emergent literacy skills (i.e., vocabulary and phonological awareness). It is also important to note that neither the direct nor the indirect effect of meaning-related HLE on word reading and listening comprehension reached statistical significance in our sample. This is surprising given that meaning-related HLE, such as shared book reading, engages children in conversations about the meaning of the stories they heard. One possible explanation may be that, as de Jong and Leseman (Reference de Jong and Leseman2001) suggested, instructional quality rather than opportunity may be a trigger that drives the association between meaning-related HLE and listening comprehension. Unfortunately, we operationalized meaning-related HLE by focusing on its amount in our parent questionnaire; this may have led to the potential underestimation of meaning-related HLE in child outcomes. Another explanation may be that we assessed children’s vocabulary knowledge only in terms of expressive vocabulary using the Word Definitions task. Future studies should examine potential task-specific and task-general relationships between meaning-related HLE and different aspects of vocabulary knowledge (e.g., receptive vs. expressive, breadth vs. depth).
Some limitations of the present study are worth mentioning. First, we used single measures to assess each variable, which may have weakened potential associations between the variables. Unfortunately, we were given only a limited amount of time to work with each child, and we had to choose between assessing more variables and administering more measures for each variable. Future studies should assess each construct with multiple measures and estimate a latent variable to represent each construct. Second, we assessed HLE using a parent self-report questionnaire with a limited number of items for each aspect, which may have attenuated the correlations between HLE and child outcomes. Third, our findings may not generalize to other cultures or languages. This is important to keep in mind, as some evidence suggests that culture and sociolinguistic contexts may moderate the association between HLE and child outcomes (e.g., Inoue et al., Reference Inoue, Manolitsis, de Jong, Landerl, Parrila and Georgiou2020; Manolitsis et al., Reference Manolitsis, Georgiou and Parrila2011). Finally, our study is correlational, using data from a single time point, and any observed effects do not directly imply causality.
To conclude, our findings show that access to literacy resources is indirectly related to both word reading and listening comprehension through early vocabulary and phonological awareness. This suggests that making literacy resources more accessible to families from diverse backgrounds may be a promising target for promoting not only early written-language skills but also oral-language skills, which provide children with a foundation for future reading comprehension.
Data availability statement
All data, analysis codes, and full model results are available on Open Science Framework (OSF) at https://osf.io/gau7s/.
Funding statement
This study was supported by the General Research Fund to Tomohiro Inoue (14619324) from the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Research Grants Council.
Competing interests
On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.
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