Simultaneous acquisition of English and Chinese impacts children’s reliance on vocabulary, morphological and phonological awareness for reading in English

ABSTRACT

The developmental process of reading acquisition is frequently conceptualized as a self-organizing mental network consisting of lexico-semantic, phonological and orthographical components. The developmental nature of this network varies across languages and is known to impact second-language learners of typologically different languages. Yet, it remains largely unknown whether such cross-linguistic differences interact within young bilingual learners of two typologically different languages. In the present study, we compared Chinese–English bilinguals and English monolinguals (ages 6–12, N = 134) born and raised in the US on their English language and reading skills including vocabulary, phonological and morphological awareness, and word reading. We conducted whole group and subgroup analyses on younger participants to examine the extent of the effect. In monolinguals, phonological abilities directly predicted English word reading. In contrast, in bilinguals, both phonological and morphological abilities made an indirect contribution to English literacy via vocabulary knowledge, even though bilinguals had monolingual-like language and reading abilities in English. These findings offer new insights into the flexibility of the phonological and lexical pathways for learning to read.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingualism
• simultaneous bilingualism
• metalinguistic knowledge
• language acquisition

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the University of Michigan Departments of Psychology, Romance Languages and Literatures, and Center for Human Growth and Development. The authors also thank the participating schools and families, Chloe Tsai, Katee Yang, Stefanie Younce, Melanie Armstrong, Kira Mascho and Alyssa Mastic for their assistance with data collection. Any opinions, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Lucy Shih-Ju Hsu, M.S., is an Educational Psychology graduate student at the University of Hong Kong, Department of Psychology. Her research interests include understanding bilingual children's language acquisition and the role of reading fluency in children's reading development. Her work ranges from developing intervention programs for improving children's reading fluency skills to examining ESL college student's cross-linguistic reading fluency skills.

Ka I. Ip is a doctoral candidate in Clinical Science at the University of Michigan. His research interests focus on understanding the developmental and etiological foundations of child psychopathology and cognitive development.

Maria M. Arredondo is a doctoral candidate in Developmental Psychology at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on bilingual children’s language and cognitive development.

Twila Tardif is a Professor at the University of Michigan, Department of Psychology and Senior Curriculum Advisor for English Language Learning at the Age of Learning/ABCmouse. Her primary research interests are in exploring the relationships between language, culture, and cognition in English, Mandarin and Cantonese. She has reported that Mandarin-speaking children use more verbs than nouns in their early vocabularies, and is developing a theory about how parents guide children’s attention in focusing on and labeling different aspects of an event to explain both universal and language-specific features of vocabulary learning.

Ioulia Kovelman, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, Department of Psychology & Center for Human Growth and Development. Her research focuses on bilingual language and reading acquisition in young children. She is especially interested in how bilingual exposure to different types of languages affects both the language ability and the neural architecture for learning to speak and to read. To accomplish these research goals, she studies bilingual infants, children, and adults using both behavioral and neuroimaging methodologies. For more information, please visit the language and literacy laboratory website at http://sites.lsa.umich.edu/kovelman-lab/.

ORCID

Maria M. Arredondo http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8343-299X

Ioulia Kovelman http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4287-6986

Notes

1 Note that although cross-linguistic literacy research often emphasizes the phoneme–morpheme dichotomy, word knowledge is multidimensional and includes word form, meaning and use in morpho-syntactic contexts (Nation 2001).

Additional information

Funding

Ioulia Kovelman thanks National Institutes of Health (grant number R01HD078351 PI: Hoeft). Maria Arredondo thanks the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF GRFP, grant Number DGE 1256260).