The Impact of Voice-Interactive Multimodal Instruction on Chinese Character Literacy Outcomes and Cognitive Load in Early Primary School: A Pilot Study

Chinese character literacy instruction for lower primary grades is commonly confronted with practical challenges, including weak association between character form, sound and meaning, high cognitive load in single-modal learning, and poor sustained attention of students. As a pilot study, this research adopted a quasi-experimental design and recruited 44 second-grade students from two parallel classes of a primary school. The experimental group received literacy instruction via a speech-interactive multimodal system, while the control group used the traditional audio reading-aloud mode. After a 2-week teaching intervention, the effects of this teaching mode on students’ literacy performance, cognitive load and learning interest were investigated. The results indicated that the total literacy score of the experimental group was significantly higher than that of the control group (p < 0.001), with differentiated performance across question types: the improvement in character pronunciation recognition was extremely significant, whereas no significant improvement was found in character form discrimination. The total cognitive load of the experimental group was significantly lower than that of the control group (p < 0.001); dimensional analysis revealed that extraneous cognitive load decreased remarkably, while germane cognitive load did not increase significantly. The total learning interest score of the experimental group was significantly higher than that of the control group (p < 0.01). However, stratified analysis by academic level showed that learning interest improved significantly in the high-score group, while no significant gain was observed in the low-score group. This pilot study preliminarily indicates that, compared with the traditional audio reading-aloud mode, speech-interactive multimodal teaching can strengthen the form-sound association and reduce extraneous cognitive load in the short term. Nevertheless, it has limitations in character form processing, deep meaning construction and motivation protection for low-achieving students, which requires supporting instructional design to compensate.