The Importance of Phonological Processing in English- and Mandarin-speaking Emergent and Fluent Readers.

Abstract

Phonological awareness is the single strongest predictor of reading ability in English-speaking children. Although the primacy of this skill is uncontested, it is still not clear why phonological awareness is such a potent predictor of reading development. For my dissertation, I proposed a cross-cultural developmental study designed to explore which components of phonological awareness were related to reading in order to gain insight into how phonological awareness was related to reading. Specifically, I investigated three questions: (i) Is the role of phonological awareness specific to a level of processing, (ii) Is the role of phonological awareness specific to language-experience, and (iii) Is the role of phonological experience specific to linguistic grain size? Overall, in the current study 140 English- and Mandarin-speaking 4- to 8-year-old children and 94 English- and Mandarin-speaking skilled adult readers were tested on a battery of measures designed to assess phonological and morphological processing and reading ability. In Study 1, phonological awareness measured by syllable and phoneme elision was the single strongest predictor of reading in 69 monolingual English- and 71 monolingual Mandarin-speaking emergent readers. Phoneme-level awareness developed later in Mandarin-speaking children than English-speaking children but was equally related to reading for children first learning to read Chinese, as for younger and older English-speaking children. However, unlike for English readers, phonological sensitivity as measured by a phonological same/different judgment task, was a marginally significant predictor of reading ability after measures of higher-order phonological awareness only in Mandarin-, but not English-speaking readers. In the Study 2, performance on the phonological sensitivity measure and the phonological awareness task was similar for 67 monolingual English- and 27 monolingual Mandarin-speaking fluent adult readers. However, for Mandarin speakers, phonological sensitivity and phoneme elision predicted unique variance in single-word-reading. For English speakers, phonological working memory and rapid naming measures but not phonological sensitivity or awareness predicted unique variance in single-word-reading. These findings suggest that phonological processing skills are present in both English- and Mandarin-speaking emergent child and skilled adult readers but may show different patterns of predicting reading depending on the sound-symbol relations of a language and the level of reading development.