Do bilingual children possess better phonological awareness? Investigation of Korean monolingual and Korean-English bilingual children

Abstract

This study examined whether there are bilingual advantages in terms of phonological awareness (PA) for children acquiring two phonologically and orthographically different alphabetic languages and investigated the emergent literacy factors that explain variances in their PA, in comparison to monolingual children. The study participants comprised seventy 5-to 6-year-old Korean-English bilingual children who had attended English-medium kindergartens for at least 2 years and fifty-six Korean monolingual children whose age and L1 oral language proficiency were matched to the bilingual participants. They were tested on a range of PA and emergent literacy skill measures including decoding skills in both Korean and English. The study findings indicated that (1) the bilingual children had a bilingual advantage in PA tasks in both L1 and L2, (2) there was language transfer in processing L1 and L2 PA for both bilingual and monolingual children, and (3) the PA of the two groups was explained by different factors. The results are discussed in terms of language-specific L1 characteristics and the potential effects of instructional differences in language arts.

The cognitive development of young dual language learners: A critical review

“…Specifically, there is evidence for a bilingual advantage in Russian-Hebrew bilinguals relative to Hebrew monolinguals (Eviatar & Ibrahim, 2000; Ibrahim, Eviatar, & Aharon-Peretz, 2007), Korean-English bilinguals relative to Korean monolinguals (Kang, 2012), English-Greek bilinguals relative to English monolinguals (Loizou & Stuart, 2003) and Putonghua-Cantonese bilinguals relative to speakers of Putonghua and Cantonese (Dodd et al, 2008). Similarly, Chen and colleagues showed that English instruction enhanced the development of phonological awareness skills in Chinese as revealed by performance of Chinese speakers who received English instruction or not (Chen, Xu, Nguyen, Hong, & Wang, 2010).…”

“…In terms of school readiness and academic achievement, some research has focused predominantly on metalinguistic awareness, but in addition examined aspects of school readiness such as early literacy skills including letter, syllable and word identification, reading, and arithmetic skills (Dixon, 2010; Kang, 2012; Lesaux & Siegel, 2003; Lesaux, Rupp, & Siegel, 2007; Lindsey et al, 2003; Macaruso & Rodman, 2011; Manis, Lindsey, & Bailey, 2004; Nakamoto, Lindsey, & Manis, 2010; Paéz, Tabors, & López, 2007; Yeong & Liow, 2011). Results from metalinguistic tasks are reported in more detail in the previous section on phonological awareness.…”

“…Overall, research examining these emergent literacy skills has shown mixed results. In some cases, bilingual children performed similarly to monolinguals on tasks such as letter identification and word reading in Korean (Kang, 2012), letter identification, word reading and reading comprehension in English (Lesaux & Siegel, 2003), and word identification and reading comprehension in Spanish and English (Manis et al, 2004). In other studies, bilingual children outperformed monolinguals on Korean pseudo-word reading (Kang, 2012), arithmetic, English spelling of words and non-words (Lesaux & Siegel, 2003), and reading in English (Dixon, 2010).…”

Cognitive Skill Transfer in English Reading Acquisition: Alphabetic and Logographic Languages Compared

“…The findings demonstrated a significant positive correlation between phonological skills in first language and the same skills in the second language, in addition of significant positive correlation between phonological skills in Hebrew and text reading and pseudo-word reading in English. Identical findings were revealed between Korean, considered as an alphabetic language, and English (Chiappe, Glaeser, & Ferko, 2007;Kim, 2009;Kang, 2012;McBride-Chang et al, 2005;Wang, Cheng, & Chen, 2006). According to these studies, there is cross-linguistic transfer of phonological awareness in spite of the differences in phonological representation between the two languages.…”

The influence of language proficiency on language-based processing skills: evidence from Korean–English bilingual children

“…Potential If the stimuli used in the NRT and KNRT are eventually proven to be equivalent, another possible reason for the better KNRT results is the influence of the very simple, transparent, and regular letter to sound patterns in Korean. Children who are able to identify the individual letters of the Korean alphabet can sound out most syllables without much difficulty (Kang, 2012). This characteristic of Korean may allow the participants who were able to read and write in Korean, even at a basic level, to more easily store and process Korean phonological information during the task.…”