A longitudinal study of prosodic reading development and reading comprehension in Chinese and English among Hong Kong Cantonese-English bilingual children

Abstract

This 1-year longitudinal study explored the developmental pattern in Cantonese and English prosodic reading among 50 Grade 2 Cantonese-English bilingual children, and examined the longitudinal relationship between early prosodic reading and later reading comprehension ability. Spectrographic analysis was conducted on six types of syntactic structures in Cantonese prosodic reading and English prosodic reading, with focus on pitch pattern and pause structure. Our results showed that Grade 3 Cantonese-English bilingual children attained adult-like prosodic reading in Cantonese but not English. Specific prosodic reading developmental patterns from Grade 2 to Grade 3 were also discovered. In Cantonese prosodic reading, children had shorter pause duration for basic declarative sentences and greater pitch fall for declarative quotative sentences. In English prosodic reading, children had smaller pitch rise for yes-no questions, greater pitch fall for wh questions and basic quotatives and shorter pause duration for wh questions and complex adjectival phrase commas. Our results also showed that longitudinal prediction of later reading comprehension ability from early prosodic reading occurred both within and across languages. However, the prediction was limited to English prosodic reading. Moreover, only English pause structure but not pitch pattern was significant in predicting later English and Chinese reading comprehension. These results suggested that English pause structure is a significant factor in predicting later Chinese and English reading comprehension ability among Cantonese-English bilingual children. These findings shed light on the application of automaticity theory and lexical quality hypothesis in Cantonese-English bilingual context, and demonstrate the importance of early prosodic reading in later reading comprehension ability.