Relationships Between First and Second Language Phonological Processing Skills and Reading in Chinese‐English Speakers living in English‐Speaking Contexts

Abstract

The relationships between phoneme categorisation, phonological processing, and reading performance were examined in Chinese‐English speaking children in an English‐speaking environment. Second language (L2, i.e., English) phonological processing but not phoneme categorisation was related to L2 reading. First language (L1) oral language skills were related to Chinese reading with L1 phonological processing being related to the Chinese reading task with a strong phonological component (pseudocharacter reading). L1 phoneme categorisation skill was not strongly related to L1 reading. These findings suggest that phonological processing is related to reading tasks with heavy phonological demands, such as reading in an alphabetic orthography or pseudocharacter reading in a nonalphabetic orthography. Exposure to L1 reading might influence processes used by Chinese‐speaking children in an English‐speaking environment.

Notes

1. So and Dodd (1995) classify kw as a cluster, while Wong and Stokes (2001) do not due to their co‐occurrence. A stance on this particular argument is not crucial to the results of this paper.

2. Pilot data examined English categorical perception performance (/p/ vs. /b/) of six Cantonese L1 adults. Their performance was compared to the performance of English L1 (EL1) speakers. No significant differences were found for the slopes of the identification functions or for the groups’ performance at each point on the curve, suggesting that adults with Cantonese as a L1 performed similar to EL1 speakers on this contrast.

3. Chinese grade showed very low nonsignificant correlations with all the English measures and the same pattern was found with months of education in Canada and the Chinese measures; therefore, only within‐language educational level was used to calculate the standardised residuals.

4. Negative correlations for the phoneme categorisation task should be treated as a positive relationship because the slopes for the identification functions were negative.

5. Due to the large significance levels for the Chinese oral cloze task, additional analyses were conducted to determine whether other patterns of relationships would be found if this task was omitted from the regression equations. No differences were found in terms of the variables that were statistically significant. Additional hierarchical regression analyses reveal that only phonological awareness accounted for unique variance for the English reading measures. However, hierarchical regression analyses for the Chinese pseudoword reading measure reveal that both phonological awareness and oral cloze accounted for unique variance.