Suprasegmental speech perception, working memory and reading comprehension in Cantonese-English bilingual children

Abstract

This study set out to examine (a) lexical tone and stress perception by bilingual and monolingual children, (b) interrelationships between lexical pitches perception, general acoustic mechanism and working memory, and (c) the association between lexical tone awareness and Chinese text reading comprehension. Experiment 1 tested and compared the perception of Cantonese lexical tones, English lexical stress and nonlinguistic pitch between Cantonese-English bilingual and English monolingual children. The relationships between linguistic pitch perception, non-linguistic pitch perception and working memory were also examined among Cantonese-English bilingual children. Experiment 2 explored the relationship between Cantonese tone awareness and Chinese text reading comprehension skills. Results of this study illustrate differential performances in tone perception but similar performances in stress perception between bilinguals and monolinguals. In addition, inter-correlations were found between linguistic pitches perception, general acoustic mechanism, working memory and reading comprehension. These findings provide new insight to native and non-native perception of lexical pitches, and demonstrate an important link that exists between lexical tone awareness and reading comprehension.