Phonological Awareness across Child Populations: How Bilingualism and Dyslexia Interact

Maria Vender,Chiara Melloni

doi:10.3390/languages6010039

Abstract

Phonological awareness is a complex and multifaceted skill which plays an essential role in the development of an individual’s language and literacy abilities. Phonological skills are indeed dramatically impaired in people with dyslexia, at any age and across languages, whereas their development in bilinguals is less clear. In addition, the interaction between bilingualism and dyslexia in this domain is still under-investigated. The aim of this paper is to provide new experimental evidence on this topic by exploring the phonological competence in Italian of monolingual and bilingual children with and without dyslexia. To this purpose, we developed three tasks, assessing nonword repetition, rhyme detection and spoonerisms, which we administered to 148 10-year-old children in two distinct studies. In Study 1, we found that two groups of L2 Italian typically developing bilinguals, having either Arabic or Romanian as L1, performed similarly to Italian monolinguals in all measures, pointing to absence of both bilingualism-related and L1-related effects in these tasks. In Study 2, we administered the same tasks to four groups of children: Italian monolinguals with dyslexia, Italian monolingual typically developing children, L2 Italian bilinguals with dyslexia and L2 Italian bilingual typically developing children. Results showed that children with dyslexia, both monolingual and bilingual, exhibited significantly more difficulties than typically developing children in all three tasks, whereas bilinguals, consistent with Study 1, performed similarly to their monolingual peers. In addition, no negative effects of bilingualism in dyslexia were found, indicating that being bilingual does not provide additional difficulties to children with dyslexia.

Highlights

Phonological Awareness (PA) refers to one’s sensitivity to the sound structures of the language input
Since phonology is severely deficient in dyslexia, higher and comparable difficulties were expected in the two groups with dyslexia than in the control groups; by comparing bilingual children with and without impairments to their monolingual peers we aimed to explore the effects of bilingualism on dyslexia in the phonological domain, an issue that has been under-investigated so far
As for reading, a significant difference was found in the accuracy of word reading (F (2, 37) = 2.820, p = 0.014, partial η2 = 0.21), with both Arabic and L2 Italian bilingual children (ARA) and Romanian L2 Italian bilingual children (ROM) scoring lower than monolingual Italian children (MON) (ARA vs. ROM: Mdifference = −0.74, p = 0.035, 95% C.I. [−1.45, −0.40]; ROM vs MON: Mdifference = −0.82, p = 0.039, 95% C.I. [−1.61, −0.03]), whereas no differences were found between ARA and ROM (Mdifference = −0.08, p = 1.000, 95% C.I. [−0.71, 0.86])

Summary

Introduction

Phonological Awareness (PA) refers to one’s sensitivity to the sound structures of the language input. It refers to the ability to identify, access and manipulate sound units such as syllables, phonemes, onsets and rhymes, and other suprasegmental units like tones (Blachman 1991; Wagner and Torgesen 1987). Far from being a monolithic construct, PA corresponds to an array of abilities involving access to and awareness of a range of sublexical elements, whose linguistic reality is often hidden by coarticulation. Children’s sensitivity to sound structures emerges early (rudimentary skills are acquired in preschool years), PA is subject to constant refinement through early grades when, with literacy experience, children learn to associate graphic symbols with phonemes (see Melloni and Vender 2020 for a review)

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