Phonological awareness skills in the two languages of Mandarin–English bilingual children

Abstract

A number of studies have shown that bilingual children have an advantage when performing on phonological awareness tasks, particularly in their stronger language. Little research has been done to date, examining the effects of bilingualism on both languages of bilingual children. In this study Mandarin–English bilingual children's performance on phonological awareness tests was compared with that of Mandarin monolingual children and English monolingual children. The Mandarin–English bilinguals performed better than English monolinguals on the Elision and Blending sub-tests of the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP). Similarly, Mandarin–English bilinguals also performed better than their Mandarin monolingual counterparts on most of the experimental Mandarin phonological awareness tasks. The results from the study are discussed in terms of the effects of bilingualism on phonological awareness in both languages of bilingual children. Further clinical and educational implications of these results are also discussed.

Keywords:

• phonological awareness
• Mandarin
• child speech
• bilingualism

Acknowledgements

The research reported here was supported in part by a UBC Hampton Fund research grant to the first author, and a BC Michael Smith Foundation Summer Research Scholarship and a Postgraduate Scholarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada to the second author. We are extremely grateful to all the children and their families who participated in this study, both in Canada and in China. We would like to acknowledge Lee Yao, Lu Hong, Ying Chen, Xinchen Wang, Jack He, and the second author's previous colleagues in the department of Child Behavior and Development of Shanghai Children's Medical Centre, especially Professor Xingming Jin, for assisting us with participant recruitment in China. Our thanks also go to Kristina Campbell, Sarah Wright, and Jill Petersen for helping with the data collection in Canada. Finally, we are grateful to an anonymous reviewer, and to Dr Linda Siegel and Erin Hall who commented on earlier versions of this paper.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Notes

1. ‘Rime’ is also spelled ‘rhyme’ (Gussenhoven and Jacobs, 1998). The term ‘rime’ is frequently used by linguists when contrasting to ‘onset’; however, ‘rhyme’ is often used in specific tasks since it is a familiar term to educators and the public.

2. The smaller number of monolingual children reflects the demographic distribution of students in public schools in the Metro Vancouver area. In order to control for socio-economic status in our sample, we aimed to recruit monolingual children from the same neighbourhoods as the Mandarin–English bilinguals. However, in the neighbourhoods where the more recent immigrant children live, the proportion of purely monolingual children is very small and, thus, subject recruitment was difficult. Results need to be interpreted more cautiously therefore concerning comparisons with the English monolinguals.

3. Based on a pilot study it was found that it was difficult for a pre-schooler to make judgement of oddity along one dimension when another dimension was also being manipulated; therefore, for the three stimuli, the same syllable was used.