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

A Close Look at Bilingualism Research in Asia

“…Based on literature, there are at least four previous works within the sociolinguistic area, these include Dixon (2009), Li and Ren (2013), Siew (2010), andTupas (2016). Another six works look at bilingualism in the psycholinguistic area, such as Brebner, McCormack, and Liow (2016), Dixon, Shuang, and Daraghmeh (2012), Lydea, Brebner and McCormack (2014), Yah, Poon, and Liow (2013), Yeong and Liow (2012), and Zhao, Liu, and Hong (2007). Since I focus on the psycholinguistic analysis, I will only highlight findings from the three societal bilingualism studies very briefly.…”

“…Using the Phonology Assessment of the Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology (DEAP), one of the most important highlights is that the Mandarindominant children had significantly less accurate consonant production in English and exhibited more interference effects from Mandarin phonology than English-dominant children (Ibid.). Focusing on similar linguistic feature, Yeong and Liow (2012) had previously worked on comparing L1 and L2 syllable and phoneme awareness in seventy English-L1 and Mandarin-L1 pre-readers. These were conducted within a three 6-month intervals and were using parallel task in both languages.…”

“…Some are interested to compare two languages in bilingual selves to examine the nature of dominance. These works include: Brebner et al (2016) and Yeong and Liow (2012) in Singapore's English -Mandarin bilingual context; and Wanga et al (2005) and Jia (2003) in China's Chinese -English bilingual situation. The first group of researchers claimed that language dominance determines the pattern of acquisition as well as interferences across languages.…”

The Impact of Bilingual Experience on The Literacy Development of Struggling Readers

“…For example, Schneps et al found that English-speaking adults with severe dyslexia outperformed typically-developing readers in visual processing tasks [43], which are an aspect of processing skills readers of Chinese are naturally more engaged in, presumably for recognizing the more complex written symbols in the language [44]. Given that processing skills and reading strategies developed in one language can be transferred to another language [45][46][47], we hypothesize that struggling readers with access to another language, and in particular a language of a different writing system [23,48], may have the opportunity to engage in high-level cognitive processes that compensate deficits associated with reading difficulties in one language. …”

“…Documented similarities in the distinctive linguistic and cognitive profiles of struggling readers who are monolingual and bilingual [20], combined with mounting evidence for bilingual advantage in verbal and nonverbal abilities, have led us to hypothesize that delay in reading development may be mitigated by bilingual experience through three mechanisms: a) enhanced attention control that allows for more efficient use of working memory during reading [21]; b) increased sensitivity to linguistic structures [19,22]; and c) availability of compensatory reading strategies through literacy development of another language [23].…”