PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS IN CHINESE MONOLINGUAL AND CHINESE-ENGLISH BILINGUAL CHILDREN by JPNG ZHAO Bachelor of Medicine (BMed), The Shanghai Second Medical University, China, 1994 Master of Medicine (MMed), The Shanghai Second Medical University, China, 1996 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF SCIENCE in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Audiology and Speech Sciences) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA October 2007 © Jing Zhao, 2007 Abstract This thesis reports on two studies that examined the development of phonological awareness in Mandarin monolingual children and the bilingual advantages in phonological awareness in Mandarin-English bilingual children. The first study was conducted in Shanghai, China to examine the development of three levels of phonological awareness in Mandarin- speaking children (i.e., syllable awareness, onset-rime awareness, and tone awareness) from the ages of 4 to 6. The results showed that like English-speaking children, the development of phonological awareness in Mandarin progressed from an awareness of relatively large segments (e.g. syllables) to smaller ones (e.g., onset-rime). Tone awareness, as a specific phonological awareness of Chinese, was developed earlier than other levels of phonological awareness in Mandarin-speaking children, whereas onset-rime awareness was last acquired. The second study compared Mandarin-English bilingual children's performance on phonological awareness with Mandarin monolingual children and English monolingual children. The results showed that Mandarin-English bilinguals performed better than English monolinguals on the Elision and Blending subtests of the CTOPP. Mandarin-English bilinguals also performed better than their Mandarin monolingual counterparts on all Mandarin phonological awareness tasks except for a syllable deletion task. The results from the two studies are discussed in terms of language- general vs. language-specific developmental profiles of phonological awareness as well as the effects of bilingualism on phonological awareness of both languages in bilingual children. Further clinical and educational implications of these results are also discussed. ii Table of Contents Abstract : ii Table of Contents iii List of Tables vi List of Figures vii Acknowledgements viii 1 INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 Overview of the thesis 1 1.2 Phonological awareness and reading 2 1.3 Development of phonological awareness skills in English 6 1.4 Development of phonological awareness skills in Chinese 8 1.4.1 Tone awareness 10 1.4.2 Syllable awareness 10 1.4.3 Onset-rime awareness 11 1.5 Phonological awareness and bilingualism 13 1.6 Cross-language transfer of phonological awareness 14 1.7 Bilingual advantage in phonological awareness 16 1.8 The present study 20 2 STUDY 1: DEVELOPMENT OF PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS IN CHINESE 23 2.1 Method 23 2.1.1 Participants 23 2.1.2 Procedures and Tasks 24 2.1.2.1 Language proficiency in Chinese 24 2.1.2.2 Phonological awareness tasks in Mandarin 25 2.1.2.2.1 Tone discrimination 25 2.1.2.2.2 Syllable deletion 26 2.1.2.2.3 Onset-rime combination 26 2.1.2.2.4 Initial sound identification 26 2.1.2.2.5 Rhyme detection 27 2.2 Results 27 2.3 Discussion 30 3 STUDY 2 : EFFECTS OF BILINGUALISM ON PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS 34 3.1 Method 34 3.1.1 Participants 34 3.1.2 Procedures and Tasks 35 3.1.2.1 Language proficiency in English 36 3.1.2.2 Phonological awareness tests in English 36 3.2 Results 36 3.2.1 Language proficiency 36 3.2.2 Effects of bilingualism on phonological awareness 38 3.2.3 Transfer of phonological awareness skills across languages 41 3.2.4 Phonological awareness and language and literacy experience in bilingual children 42 3.3 Discussion 45 3.3.1 Effects of bilingualism on phonological awareness 45 3.3.2 Language proficiency in bilingual children 48 3.3.3 Transfer of phonological awareness skills across languages 49 3.3.4 Factors influencing the development of phonological awareness 50 4 GENERAL DISCUSSION 52 4.1 Summary of findings 52 4.2 Implications 53 4.3 Limitations 55 iv References 56 Appendix A Tone Discrimination 65 Appendix B Syllable Deletion 66 Appendix C Onset-rime Combination 67 Appendix D Initial Sound Identification 68 Appendix E Rhyme Detection 69 Appendix F UBC Research Ethics Board Certificate of Approval 70 v List of Tables Table 1 Participant characteristics in Study 1 24 Table 2 Chinese PPVT and mean correct percentages of phonological awareness tasks in Mandarin-speaking children 28 Table 3 Participant characteristics in Study 2 35 Table 4 Means and standard deviations of Chinese PPVT and English PPVT in Study 2 38 Table 5 Performance on English phonological awareness tests in bilingual children and English monolinguals 39 Table 6 Performance on Mandarin phonological awareness tasks in bilingual children and Mandarin monolinguals 40 Table 7 Correlations between English and Mandarin phonological awareness measures 42 Table 8 Descriptive statistics on background variables in bilingual children 43 Table 9 Correlations between background variables and language proficiency and phonological awareness measures in both languages of bilingual children 45 vi List of Figures Figure 1 Percentage correct on Mandarin phonological awareness tasks by age in Study 1 30 Figure 2 Percentage correct on Mandarin phonological awareness tasks by age and language in Study 2 41 vii Acknowledgements I wish to express my deepest thanks to my research supervisor, Dr. Stefka H. Marinova- Todd, for the support, guidance, and encouragement that she has given to me over the past two years. I also want to thank my committee members, Prof. Linda Siegel and Prof. May (Barbara) Bernhardt, for their valuable and thoughtful comments about my study. Thank you to Kristina Campbell and Sarah Wright for helping with the data collection. Much appreciation also goes to the people who helped me recruit participants, including Lee Yao, Lu Hong, Ying Chen, Xinchen Wang, Jack He, and my previous colleagues in the Department of Child Behavior and Development of Shanghai Children's Medical Centre, especially Prof. Xingming Jin. I am grateful, too, to Erin Hall for editing early drafts of this thesis. Writing this thesis has given me new appreciation for the cultural difference in literacy. Thanks also to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada for funding this research. I also greatly appreciate the contributions that the participants and their families have made to this study. I would also like to thank many other people. First, let me thank all the faculty members of the School of Audiology & Speech Sciences, especially Prof. Judith Johnston, for her encouragement and inspiration. Many thanks go to my parents not only for being so supportive, but also for letting me ruin a perfectly good summer vocation by collecting data for this thesis in Shanghai. Finally, I want to express gratitude to my husband for the support and love he always gave so freely and the pride he took in all my endeavors. viii 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Overview of the thesis Phonological awareness is a set of metalinguistic skills by which children become aware of and consciously manipulate the sound structure of a language (Gombert, 1992). It is important in predicting early reading development in alphabetic languages such as English (Adams, 1990; Goswami & Bryant, 1990) and non-alphabetic languages such as Chinese (Cheng, 1992; Anderson, Li, Ku, Shu, & Wu, 2003; He, Wang, & Anderson, 2005; Chow, McBride- Chang, & Burgess, 2005). However, different languages require different levels of phonological awareness skills. Phonemic awareness is important in learning to read English (Bruck, Genesee, & Caravolas, 1997) whereas syllable awareness and onset-rime awareness are central to reading acquisition in Chinese (Huang & Hanley, 1995; McBride-Chang & Ho, 2000; Ho & Bryant, 1997a; Hu & Carts, 1998; So & Siegel, 1997; Siok & Fletcher, 2001). Therefore, it is important to discover the types of phonological awareness that young speakers of a particular language develop before investigating the significance of phonological awareness in predicting reading acquisition. Although a large body of research has investigated the development of phonological awareness in alphabetic languages (see Gombert, 1992; Gillon, 2004, for a review), the development of phonological awareness in Chinese has rarely been systematically studied. The present study attempts to address this gap in the literature by examining the development of different phonological awareness skills with Mandarin-speaking preschoolers in Mainland China. In the last two decades, researchers have shown great interest in phonological awareness and bilingualism since it is generally believed that bilingual children have more advanced 1 i metalinguistic awareness skills than monolingual children (Cummins, 1978; Bialystok, 1986; Yelland, Pollard, & Mercuri, 1993). The transfer of phonological awareness skills across languages in bilingual speakers has been established in previous studies (Durgunoglu, Nagy, & Hancin-Bhatt, 1993; Comeau, Cormier, Grandmaison, & Lacroix, 1999; Gottardo, Siegel, Yan, & Wade-Woolley, 2001; Chow, McBride-Chang, & Burgess, 2005). Moreover, research has shown that bilingual children outperform monolingual children on phonological awareness tasks (Bruck & Genesee, 1995; Yelland, Pollard, & Mercuri, 1993; Chen, Anderson, Li, Hao, Wu, & Shu, 2004). However, most studies have focused on examining the bilingual advantage in phonological awareness in only one