A longitudinal study of phonological processing skills and reading in bilingual children

Abstract

French/English bilingual children (N=40) in French language schools participated in an 8-month longitudinal study of the relation between phonological processing skills and reading in French and English. Participants were administered measures of phonological awareness, working memory, naming speed, and reading in both languages. The results of the concurrent analyses show that phonological awareness skills in both French and English were uniquely predictive of reading performance in both languages after accounting for the influences of cognitive ability, reading ability, working memory, and naming speed. These findings support the hypothesis that phonological awareness is strongly related to beginning word reading skill in an alphabetic orthography. The results of the longitudinal analyses also suggest that orthographic depth influences phonological factors related to reading.

The impact of an intervention on children's reading and spelling ability in low-income schools in India

“…This is true when the first language shares a similar orthography to English, due to the strong relationship between phonological knowledge and beginning word reading skills in alphabetic texts (Lafrance & Gottardo, 2005). Although having a first language that is nonalphabetic may slow down the development of phonemic awareness compared to those who read the Roman alphabet (Cheung, Chen, Lai, Wong, & Hills, 2001), there is evidence here also of a reciprocal relationship between first-and secondlanguage learning in this respect (Chien, Kao, & Wei, 2008;Kim, 2009;Wang, Perfetti, & Liu, 2005;Wang, Yang, & Cheng, 2009).…”

Morphological awareness in Spanish-speaking English language learners: within and cross-language effects on word reading

“…Transfer of phonological awareness has received the most research attention among different aspects of metalinguistic awareness. Crosslinguistic effects of phonological awareness have been reported between many language combinations such as Spanish and English (Cisero & Royer, 1995;Durgunoglu, Nagy, & Hancin-Bhatt, 1993), French and English (Comeau et al, 1999;LaFrance & Gottardo, 2005), and even between more distant languages such as Hebrew and English (Wade-Woolley & Geva, 2000), Arabic and English (Wagner, Spratt, & Ezzaki, 1989), and Chinese and English (Gottardo, Yan, Siegel, & Wade-Woolley, 2001). Given these findings, phonological awareness is considered largely independent of specific language experiences (Genessee, Geva, Dressler, & Kamil, 2006).…”

“…Among different aspects of metalinguistic awareness, transfer of phonological awareness has been most extensively investigated (Comeau, Cormier, Grandmaison, & Lacroix, 1999;LaFrance & Gottardo, 2005). This body of research has provided strong evidence that phonological awareness is a common underlying ability that is largely independent of language specific effects (Genesee & Geva, 2006).…”

Language and preliteracy skills in bilinguals and monolinguals at preschool age: effects of exposure to richly inflected speech from birth

“…Some studies have demonstrated that bilinguals possess more advanced PA than their monolingual peers (Bialystok, Majumder, & Martin, 2003;Chen et al, 2004;McBride-Chang, Bialystok, Chong, & Li, 2004), and that PA in one language can influence beginning word reading in the other language. For example, rhyme detection in Chinese has been related to phonological skills and reading in English (Gottardo, Yan, Siegel, & WadeWoolley, 2001; see also Bialystok, Luk, & Kwan, 2005; for transfer in FrenchEnglish, see Lafrance & Gottardo, 2005; Turkish-Dutch, see Verhoeven, 2007). The finding on transfer of PA across languages, according to Gottardo et al (2001, p. 539) "points to an underlying process that is not specific to the child's L1 phonology but that is related to the child's ability to reflect on all phonology to which he or she has a minimum level of exposure".…”