Comparison of the Phonological Awareness Abilities of Monolingual Cantonese and Putonghua-Speaking Children

Abstract

The experiment reported here examined the phonological awareness (PA) abilities of four- and five-year-old children learning Cantonese in Hong Kong and Putonghua in China. The four-year-olds had no exposure to formal literacy teaching, whereas the five-year-olds were exposed to different orthographic systems: the Puntonghua-speaking children learned Pinyin (a Romanized alphabet) and the Cantonese-speaking children learned to recognize words in a logographic orthographic system. These data allow investigation of the effect of the acquisition of an alphabetic orthography on phonological awareness. The purpose of the study was to investigate whether syllable and onset-rime awareness emerge in the absence of knowledge about alphabetically written words. Two syllable tasks, one rhyme task, a word-initial phoneme detection tasks and a task assessing tone discrimination were administered. The results indicated that exposure to Pinyin (the five-year-old Putonghua-speakers) significantly enhanced their overall phonological awareness mean score. The only task showing a significantly better performance by the older Putonghua participants in comparison to all other groups was phoneme detection. The older Putonghua children also performed better than the younger Putonghua-speakers on the syllable deletion and rhyme detection task. The performance of the younger and older Cantonese-speakers, who were exposed to a logographic orthography, did not differ. These data suggest that knowledge of alphabetic orthography is important for phonological awareness at the phoneme level, and also contributes some advantage at syllable and rhyme levels. The relationship between phonological awareness and the acquisition of alphabetic literacy is considered in the discussion.