Cross-linguistic influence of phonological awareness and phonological recoding skills in Chinese reading acquisition among early adolescent students

Abstract

This study investigated crosslinguistic phonological awareness and phonological recoding skills in Chinese reading acquisition among early Chinese adolescent students. 76 Chinese children participated in this study and finished a series of reading measurements over 1 year (from Grade 5 to Grade 6). In Grade 5, they were assessed by Chinese phonological awareness (syllable, onset, rhyme, phoneme, and tone awareness), English phonological awareness (syllable, onset, and rime, phoneme awareness) as well as English and Chinese phonological recoding skills. In Grade 6, the students completed the measurement of Chinese lexical inferencing ability. Subsequent hierarchical regression analyses showed that Time 1 (Grade 5) Chinese phonological awareness and recoding skills made a joint intra-lingual contribution to later Chinese lexical inferencing ability. Moreover, English phonological recoding skills had a unique inter-lingual contribution to later Chinese lexical inferencing ability after age, nonverbal intelligence, and English phonological awareness were controlled for. Results expanded the self-teaching hypothesis to account for variations within and across languages over time and underscored the uniqueness of inter-lingual phonological recoding in later orthographic and semantic learning.

Keywords:

• Adolescent reader
• lexical inference
• phonological awareness
• phonological recoding
• self-teaching hypothesis

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

The study was sponsored by the Shanghai Planning Project of Philosophy and Social Sciences [2018EYY009] and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [2017ECNU-HLYT007].