Levels of phonological awareness: What is the role of suprasegmental phonological awareness in Chinese childrenâ s English word reading?

Abstract

Purpose - Most models of English word reading emphasize the importance of children s ability to segment words into individual phonemes to word reading development. This abundant interest in segmental phonological awareness contrasts sharply with the paucity of research on suprasegmental phonological awareness, or to children s ability to distinguish linguistic pitch patterns, such as stress in English and tone in Chinese, in English word reading. In the current study, we examined the contribution of both Chinese and English suprasegmental phonological awareness to English word reading in Hong Kong Chinese children. This population is of particular interest given that these children are learning two prosodically distinct languages: Chinese and English Method - We administered two measures of suprasegmental phonological processing (Chinese tone awareness and English stress awareness ), as well as Chinese and English phonological awareness and reading tasks to 188 second grade Chinese-English bilingual children. Results - Structural equation modeling revealed that Chinese tone awareness uniquely predicted English word reading via English stress awareness, even after controlling for segmental phonological awareness and Chinese word reading. Conclusion - These results suggest that both Chinese lexical tone and English lexical stress are important to English word reading for Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children. It seems that children s sensitivity to the first language s suprasegmental features (Chinese) facilitates the acquisition of second language reading (English). At least for Chinese learners of English, it seems that a comprehensive model of English word reading development needs to include suprasegmental phonological awareness.