The development of phonological representations in Mandarin-speaking children: Evidence from a longitudinal study of phonological awareness

Abstract

Two competing approaches to the analysis of the phonological structure of Mandarin syllables have been put forward. The first and more traditional approach is that a syllable can be segmented into initial consonant, medial glide, nucleus plus coda and tone. The second approach does not distinguish the non-compulsory medial glide as an independent element. To compare and evaluate these two different approaches, the development of phoneme-level awareness was investigated in 67 Mandarin-speaking children in Year 1 of school (mean age: 6;9) and Year 5 (mean age: 10;1). Results showed that at school entry some children were sensitive to glides and to a lesser extent to codas; their number increased by Year 5. This suggests that spoken language experience is enough for some children to acquire the representation of glides and codas; this is consistent with the traditional model of the Mandarin syllable, with both glides and codas as independent elements. However, the children’s task performance was generally rather poor, even in Year 5, suggesting that development of phonemic sensitivity in Mandarin speaking children is not substantially improved by increased literacy experience.

• Codas
• glides
• Mandarin-speaking children
• phonological awareness
• representation of phonological structure

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to all children, parents and teachers who took part in the study for their participation and support (Grant No: Mackay Medical College 1021A02).

Declaration of interest

The authors have no conflict of interest to declare.

Notes

¹In analysing differences, we used Cohen’s d measure of effect size, and follow Cohen’s (1992) convention of interpreting it, where 0–0.19 means a negligible difference, 0.20–0.49 a small difference, 0.50–0.79 a moderate difference and 0.80 and above a large difference (Cohen, 1992).