Phonological awareness (PA) in Chinese-English bilingual word decoding (reading)

Abstract

Phonological awareness is one of core reading requisites in early reading acquisition. Children develop initial phonemic awareness and phonological awareness, which in turn contribute to their learning-to-read skills, word reading and decoding abilities in particular. This review study synthesized the relationship between phonological awareness and word reading ability in monolingual and Chinese-English bilingual readers to shed light on the universal and language-specific mechanisms of phonological awareness in word reading in two typologically-distant languages. The findings indicate that phonological awareness has different grain sizes (e.g., onset, rime, phoneme, and syllable) in shaping early reading acquisition. More important, the current study highlights the uniqueness of universality and language specificity in Chinese-English bilingual reading acquisition. In addition to general phonological awareness facets, lexical tone awareness has been endorsed as a key predictor of early Chinese-English bilingual word reading.