The effects of Spanish heritage language literacy on English reading for Spanish–English bilingual children in the US

ABSTRACT

Models of monolingual literacy propose that reading acquisition builds upon children’s semantic, phonological, and orthographic knowledge. The relationships between these components vary cross-linguistically, yet it is generally unknown how these differences impact bilingual children’s literacy. A comparison between Spanish–English bilingual and English monolingual children (ages 6–13, N = 70) from the US revealed that bilinguals had stronger associations between phonological and orthographic representations than monolinguals during English reading. While vocabulary was the strongest predictor of English word reading for both groups, phonology and morphosyntax were the best predictors of Spanish reading for bilinguals. This comparison reveals distinct developmental processes across learners and languages, and suggests that early and systematic biliteracy exposure at home and through afterschool programs can influence children’s sound-to-print associations even in the context of language-specific (monolingual) reading instruction. These findings have important implications for bilingual education as well as theories that aim to explain how learning to read across languages has a positive impact on the acquisition of literacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingualism
• biliteracy
• heritage languages
• bilingual education
• Spanish

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 ‘En Nuestra Lengua’ Literacy and Culture Program in Ann Arbor, MI, participating families, Lourdes M. Delgado Reyes, Ka I Ip, Jaime Muñoz Velazquez, Paola Velosa, Stefanie Younce, and Melanie Armstrong for their assistance with data collection. Any opinions, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF.

Notes on contributors

Lena V. Kremin is a graduate student in linguistics, and received her B.A. in Linguistics, and Biopsychology, Cognition, and Neuroscience from the University of Michigan. Her research interests include bilingualism and language acquisition.

Maria M. Arredondo is a doctoral candidate in Developmental Psychology at the University of Michigan, under the supervision of Dr Ioulia Kovelman. Her research focuses on bilingual children's language and cognitive development.

Lucy Shih-Ju Hsu, M.S., is an Educational Psychology graduate student at the University of Hong Kong, Department of Psychology. She received both her B.S. in Neuroscience and Psychology (2013) and her M.S. in Developmental Psychology (2014) from the University of Michigan. 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.

Teresa Satterfield, Associate Professor of Romance Linguistics, is a psycholinguist at the University of Michigan. Her areas of investigation are bilingual child language development and questions of language contact and change in bilingual contexts. Extensions of her research include heritage language literacy and advocacy for young heritage language speakers. She is founder and director of the Spanish-immersion Saturday school “En Nuestra Lengua (ENL),” an academic program for Pre-K to fourth-grade Spanish heritage language students in Southeast Michigan.

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

Additional information

Funding

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