Cognitive–linguistic foundations of early spelling development in bilinguals.

Abstract

Developing spelling skills in English is a particularly demanding task for Chinese speakers because, unlike many other bilinguals leaming English as a second language, they must leam two languages with different orthography as well as phonology. To disentangle socioeconomic and pedagogical factors from the underlying cognitive-linguistic processes that predict the development of spelling, we used a 6-month longitudinal design and compared children with English as their first language (English-Ll; n = 50) and children with Mandarin as their first language (Mandarin-Ll; n = 50) from the same kindergarten. Both groups were tested on parallel versions of English and Mandarin tasks as predictors at Time 1, and their spelling sophistication scores were then computed from a 52-item experimental task administered at Time 2. After we controlled for nonverbal IQ, age, vocabulary, and spelling achievement on Wide Range Achievement Test 4 at Time 1, regression analyses showed that phoneme awareness was the strongest predictor of spelling sophistication for English-Ll children, but syllable awareness and letter-sound knowledge were also important for Mandarin-Ll children. The implications of these differences in the cognitive-linguistic processing of bilingual children leaming two dissimilar languages are briefly discussed.

Importance of phonological and orthographic skills for English reading and spelling: A comparison of English monolingual and Mandarin-English bilingual children.

“…Despite their poorer phonological skills, these young bilingual children continued to rely on such skills for reading and spelling English. These findings are similar to studies conducted with Chinese-Ll children where the strongest predictor of English word reading and word spelling approximations was phonological awareness (Gottardo et al, 2001;McBride-Chang & Kail, 2002;Yeong & Rickard Liow, 2011). Furthermore, our findings showed that the same relationship between phonological skills and reading was evident for the older bilingual children.…”

Development of phonological awareness in English–Mandarin bilinguals: A comparison of English–L1 and Mandarin–L1 kindergarten children

“…More recently, Sze and Rickard Liow (2011) also provided empirical evidence that L1 morphophonemic knowledge (i. e., the interaction of phonological and morphological components) generalizes from the dominant language during second language acquisition. However, the positive influence of one language on the acquisition of skills in the other language will be more limited when the phonological and morphological components of the children's two languages are as different as Mandarin and English (Chen et al, 2010;Rickard Liow & Lau, 2006;Yeong & Rickard Liow, 2011) or Cantonese and English (Wang & Geva, 2003).…”

“…This clear relationship between phonological awareness and literacy acquisition has been demonstrated both in monolingual English-speaking children and in bilingual children learning English as a second language (ESL) (McBride-Chang & Kail, 2002;McBride-Chang et al, 2008;Yeong & Rickard Liow, 2011). Despite this important connection to reading and spelling, the early development of phonological awareness itself has received relatively little attention in children learning to speak two languages with different phonological structures.…”

Development of an Assessment Battery for Reading and Writing Difficulties in the Second Grade: Should Measures of Handedness Be Included?

“…As is generally known, word writing (or spelling), like reading, involves vocabulary knowledge and temporary memory processes, as well as metalinguistic knowledge. Although the correlations for individual performance on single-word reading and spelling tasks are high (Pearson's r=0.89 for 157 children, Gedutienė 2008), children with language impairments and those at risk for dyslexia often find spelling more problematic than reading (Yeong & Liow 2011). It seems that spelling is the more challenging task, because unlike reading it requires fully specified orthographic lexical representations (Angelelli et al 2010).…”