Reading skills and the discrimination of English vowel contrasts by bilingual Spanish/English-speaking children: Is there a correlation?

Abstract

This study examined the discrimination of English vowel contrasts in real and novel word-pairs by 21 children: 11 bilingual Spanish/English- and 10 monolingual English-speaking children, 8–12 years of age (M=10; 6; Mdn=10; 4). The goal was to determine if children with poor reading skills had difficulty with discrimination, an essential factor in reading abilities. A categorial discrimination task was used in an ABX discrimination paradigm: A (the first word in the sequence) and B (the second word in the sequence) were different stimuli, and X (the third word in the sequence) was identical to either A or to B. Stimuli were produced by one of three different speakers. Seventy-two monosyllabic words were presented: 36 real English and 36 novel words. Vowels were those absent from the inventory of Spanish vowels. Discrimination accuracy for the English-speaking children with good reading skills was significantly greater than for the bilingual-speaking children with good or poor reading skills. Early age of acquisition and greater percentage of time devoted to communication in English played the greatest role in bilingual children’s discrimination and reading skills. The adjacency of vowels in the F1-F2 acoustic space presented the greatest difficulty.