Tone Awareness Research Articles

Examining the cognitive and perceptual perspectives of music-to-language transfer: A study of Cantonese–English bilingual children

Motivated by theories of music-to-language transfer, we investigated whether and how musicianship benefits phonological and lexical prosodic awareness in first language (L1) Cantonese and second language (L2) English. We assessed 86 Cantonese–English bilingual children on rhythmic sensitivity, pitch sensitivity, nonverbal intelligence, inhibitory control, working memory, Cantonese phonological awareness, Cantonese tone awareness, English phonological awareness, and English stress awareness. Based on their prior music learning experience, we classified the children as musicians and non-musicians. The musicians performed better than the non-musicians on Cantonese phonological awareness, Cantonese tone awareness, and English phonological awareness. In addition, the musicians had superior pitch sensitivity, nonverbal intelligence, inhibitory control, and working memory than the non-musicians. For Cantonese and English phonological awareness, neither cognitive abilities nor pitch and rhythmic sensitivities turned out to be a unique predictor. However, working memory uniquely predicted Cantonese tone awareness, with age, rhythmic sensitivity, and pitch sensitivity controlled. From a theoretical perspective, our findings on Cantonese tone awareness favors the cognitive perspective of music-to-language transfer, in which working memory enhancement could explain the musicians’ superior performance in Cantonese tone awareness. However, our findings on phonological awareness do not favor the cognitive perspective, nor do they favor the perceptual perspective, in which enhanced rhythmic and pitch sensitivities could explain musicians’ advantage.

The role of the traditional and digital home literacy environment in Chinese Kindergartners’ language and early literacy

In this study, we examined whether a digital home literacy environment could be distinguished from a traditional literacy environment in Chinese context and the relationship between parental literacy expectations, traditional and digital home literacy environment, and children's language and early literacy skills. In addition, we explored whether the relationship between HLE and children's language and early literacy would be affected by parental perceived abilities with home literacy activities. One hundred and seventy kindergarten-2 children (82 boys and 88 girls; mean age = 55.15 months) and their parents participated in the study. Parents filled out a questionnaire on the home environment (i.e., parental expectations, home literacy activities, and parental perceived abilities in home literacy activities), and the children were assessed on language skills (vocabulary and grammatical skills) and early literacy (i.e., syllable and tone awareness). Results showed that a digital home literacy environment (DHLE) could be distinguished from a traditional home literacy environment (THLE). Chinese traditional home literacy environment consisted of three distinct aspects (Chinese speaking, Chinese writing, and informal literacy activities). Furthermore, there were no direct or indirect effects of (aspects of) the home literacy environment in predicting language skills, whereas an indirect effect of parental literacy expectations on early literacy was found, via the DHLE only. Finally, there was a positive relationship between DHLE and children's early literacy for parents who experience difficulties in providing the conditions for DHLE. Overall, these findings suggest that the DHLE has already become an important part of the Chinese home literacy environment. In addition, when it comes to children's early literacy skills, the use of digital learning tools may partly compensate for parent's difficulties in digital home literacy education.

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

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.

Speech Prosody and Reading Comprehension in Chinese-English Bilingual Children: The Mediating Role of Syntactic Awareness.

Although children's prosodic sensitivity links with their reading comprehension, the factors affecting this link remain unclear. By simultaneously measuring first language (L1) Chinese and second language (L2) English prosodic sensitivity and reading comprehension, this study examined the mediating role of syntactic awareness on prosody-reading comprehension among Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children. A group of 227 Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual fourth graders completed L1 and L2 prosodic sensitivity (Cantonese lexical tone awareness and English prosodic sensitivity), syntactic awareness, and reading comprehension and control measures of cognitive (nonverbal IQ, short-term memory, and working memory), metalinguistic (phonological awareness and morphological awareness), linguistic (vocabulary knowledge), and word reading skills. The within-language analyses showed a partial mediation effect of Chinese syntactic awareness on the relation between Cantonese lexical tone awareness and Chinese reading comprehension, but a full mediation effect of English syntactic awareness on the relation between English prosodic sensitivity and English reading comprehension. The cross-language analyses revealed a significant direct effect of Cantonese lexical tone awareness on English reading comprehension and a significant indirect effect of English prosodic sensitivity on Chinese reading comprehension via Chinese syntactic awareness. These findings suggest that, despite the language-independent mediating role of syntactic awareness in bridging prosody and reading comprehension, the degree of this mediation is shaped by language-specific prosody and its relations with other linguistic structures, including semantics.

Relationships Between First and Second Language Phonological Awareness and Rapid Automatized Naming in Chinese Children with Dyslexia

Relationships Between First and Second Language Phonological Awareness and Rapid Automatized Naming in Chinese Children with Dyslexia

Evaluating the Critical Period Influence on the Development of Semantic Radicals Awareness and Lexical Tones Awareness in Chinese Character Recognition

The present study adopts the priming word-judging paradigm to investigate whether the critical period will influence radical and lexical tone awareness during the bilinguals' Chinese character recognition. Two types of bilinguals (simultaneous and sequential bilinguals) will be recruited as participants in the present study. The different features between these two types of participants are used to test the influence of the critical period. Through a Chinese character decision task experiment, we hypothesis that the critical period will influence the semantic radical and lexical tone awareness while processing the Chinese characters of bilinguals. In addition, this study will provide some advice to learning Chinese characters in second language acquisition.

Prosodic Transfer in English Literacy Skills among Chinese Elementary-Age Students: Controlling for Non-Verbal Intelligence.

Building upon the prosodic transfer hypothesis, the current study aims to examine the intermediary effect of English stress on the relation between Chinese lexical tone awareness and English word-level literacy (reading and spelling) as well as the moderating effect of English oral vocabulary proficiency on the cross-linguistic association. Grade 4 Chinese learners of English (N = 224) participated in this study and were assessed for their tone and stress sensitivity, English oral vocabulary, English word reading, and English word spelling. Mediated multivariate analyses with moderation were used to explore: (1) whether the influence of lexical tone perception on L2 word reading and spelling was mediated by English stress as posited in the prosodic transfer hypothesis; (2) whether the effects of tone on English word reading and spelling performance varied as a function of oral vocabulary levels. The findings revealed a direct positive relationship between Chinese tone and English word reading and spelling, and the relationship was mediated by English stress awareness. Furthermore, the direct pathway from tone to English word-level literacy skills were moderated by oral vocabulary and the relationship between tone and English word-level skills became stronger as oral vocabulary levels increased; however, such strength reached a plateau among children without adequate oral vocabulary skills. These findings suggest the necessity to incorporate word spelling as an outcome in the cross-suprasegmental phonological transfer models of early literacy development. Additionally, the current study endorses the complexity of cross-language prosodic transfer. It points to a precise threshold for sufficient L2 oral vocabulary skills to enable tone transfer in English word-level literacy attainment.

Reading Fluency in Chinese Children With Reading Disabilities and/or ADHD: A Key Role for Morphology

The Triangle Model of Reading proposes that phonology, orthography, and semantics are crucial to understand word reading and reading disability (RD). Morphology has been added as a binding agent to this model. However, it is unclear how these variables relate to word reading in children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or comorbid ADHD and RD (ADHD+RD). This study examined the performance of Chinese children with RD, ADHD, or ADHD+RD in phonology, orthography, semantics, and morphology, and investigated whether morphology made an additional contribution beyond the other skills in explaining word reading fluency. Participants were 151 Grade 1 to 3 Chinese students: RD (n = 31), ADHD (n = 43), ADHD+RD (n = 27), and typically developing controls (TD, n = 50). Results indicated that children with ADHD+RD (a) showed similar performance to RD and ADHD in tone awareness, orthographic legality, and homophone morpheme awareness; (b) had similar performance to RD but worse than ADHD in phonology, semantics, and morpheme production; and (c) had more severe deficits than RD and ADHD in orthographic reversal, morpheme identification, and homograph awareness. Morphology significantly predicted word reading fluency beyond the other skills, and its predictive effect was more salient for ADHD+RD, ADHD, and TD. The findings provide evidence of both shared and additive effects of RD and ADHD. Morphology may be an important diagnostic factor in identifying Chinese reading and behavioral deficit groups and a worthwhile target for intervention.

Directionality and developmental mechanism of cross‐linguistic transfer of phonological awareness to early writing skill in young Chinese learners

AbstractThe longitudinal study investigated the directionality and transfer mechanism of cross‐linguistic transfer of phonological awareness between L1 and L2 in predicting early writing (word dictation) in Chinese children learning English as L2. Ninety primary school Grade 1 (P1) students were assessed on phonological awareness in Cantonese (syllable deletion, onset deletion, rime deletion, and tone awareness), phonological awareness in English (syllable deletion, rime detection, and phoneme deletion), Cantonese word writing, and English word writing at Time 1. These students were assessed on the same measures 1 year later at Time 2 when they were in Grade 2. The results demonstrated bidirectional cross‐linguistic transfer of phonological awareness and early writing between Cantonese and English. It also showed that the transfers were achieved through same time writing skills (bidirectional) and future phonological awareness (from L1 to L2 only). No direct effect of earlier phonological awareness to later writing skill was found.

Evaluating Bilingual Children’s Native Language Abilities in Côte d’Ivoire: Introducing the Ivorian Children’s Language Assessment Toolkit for Attié, Abidji, and Baoulé

AbstractFew standardized language assessments are adapted to different cultural and linguistic contexts to assess children’s first language (L1) abilities. We introduce the Ivorian Children’s Language Assessment Toolkit for measuring phonological awareness, vocabulary, oral comprehension, and tone awareness in the Abidji, Attié, and Baoulé languages of Côte d’Ivoire. Six hundred and three primary-school children (age 4–14) completed language assessments in their L1 and French. The toolkit provided a reliable and comprehensive assessment of children’s language abilities. We observed age- and grade-related increases in all subtest scores. Still, children scored higher in their L1 compared to French, highlighting the need for language assessments in a bilingual’s two languages to achieve an accurate measure of children’s language abilities. The ability to benchmark children’s scores relative to age- and grade-norms are discussed in the context of language of instruction education policies as well as the potential use of age- and grade-norms in identifying children with language impairment and/or children who are at risk for reading difficulties due to poor language skills.

The Role of Phonological Awareness, Pinyin Letter Knowledge, and Visual Perception Skills in Kindergarteners' Chinese Character Reading.

Word identification models assume that words are identified by at least two sources of information and analysis; one is phonological, and the other is visual. The present study investigated the influence of phonological awareness, Pinyin letter knowledge, and visual perception skills on Chinese character recognition after controlling for vocabulary, rapid naming, and verbal short-term memory in 80 Mandarin-speaking kindergarten children. Children were tested on phonological awareness (syllable awareness, onset-end rhyme awareness, and tone awareness), Pinyin letter naming, and visual perception (visual discrimination and visual-spatial relationships). The results showed that variance in Chinese character recognition could be explained by syllable awareness and tone awareness, but not by visual perception skills or Pinyin letter knowledge. Analyses further indicated that Pinyin letter knowledge moderated the relationship between tone awareness and Chinese character recognition. A focus on tone awareness and syllable awareness in the kindergarten may help Chinese children to accomplish the transition from phonological awareness to early literacy, while Pinyin letter knowledge can help children to make the connection between Chinese speech and writing.

Lower prosodic sensitivity in Chinese children with dyslexia and its impact on Chinese reading.

The current study aims to examine prosodic sensitivity in Chinese children with dyslexia and its relation to Chinese reading in children with and without dyslexia. A total of 172 Chinese children from third grade to sixth grade in Taiwanese primary schools were recruited. Thirty (14 male) children were identified as having dyslexia, and the remaining children (N= 142; 67 male) were typically developing children matched with those with dyslexia as carefully as possible with respect to school, grade, and gender. Our results indicated that group differences were found for all three types of prosodic sensitivity. Moderation analyses showed that group had no significant interaction with prosodic sensitivity in predicting Chinese reading, so the participants in the two groups were combined in the following analyses. The results of the stepwise regression analyses showed that only lexical tone awareness could significantly predict Chinese character reading after controlling for phonological awareness, while only intonation awareness could significantly predict reading comprehension after controlling for Chinese character reading. The results provide preliminary evidence on the issue of prosodic sensitivity in Chinese children with dyslexia and its role in Chinese reading, which might provide a novel approach to the teaching of Chinese languages.

Concurrent and longitudinal contributions of phonological awareness to early adolescent Chinese reading acquisition

This study investigated universal and language-specific phonological awareness in reading development among Chinese early adolescent students. Seventy-six children participated in this study and completed a series of reading tasks at two data collection points across Grades 5 and 6. In Grade 5, universal phonological awareness (syllable, onset, rhyme, and phoneme awareness), language-specific phonological awareness (tone awareness) as well as character recognition and production measurements were administered to the participants. Lexical inferencing ability was measured in Grade 6. Character recognition and lexical inference were coded as the outcome variables. Subsequent multiple regression analyses showed that Time 1 (Grade 5) language-universal onset and phoneme awareness predicted character recognition and production at Time 1. More strikingly, the study demonstrated that language-specific tone awareness exerted a longitudinal effect on later lexical inferencing ability after controlling for age and nonverbal intelligence. Results underscored both the universality and language specificity of phonological awareness and provided empirical evidence to substantiate the facilitative role of early language-specific psycholinguistic grain size in later reading performance.

The Effects of Lexical Tone Awareness on Early Word Recognition, Word Reading, and Spelling From Dictation of Thai Children: A Longitudinal Study.

In tonal languages such as Thai, lexical tone (the pitch of a syllable) affects word meaning. This study examined the effects of lexical tone awareness (LTA) on early word recognition and the relationship between these abilities and word reading and spelling in subsequent grades. A longitudinal design was used to assess reading-related skills in 259 Thai children, first in kindergarten (130 girls, Mage=67.25months) and later in Grade 3 (Mage=102.25months). In kindergarten, the children were tested on lexical tone identification and differentiation, early literacy skills, non-verbal IQ, and early word recognition. In Grade 3, they were tested on word reading and spelling from dictation. The hierarchical regression analyses showed that the lexical tone identification skills in kindergarten accounted for 2% of the unique variance in early word recognition. However, none of the LTA skills could predict word reading and spelling from dictation after controlling for other literacy-related skills. These findings suggest that LTA skill positively associated with early word recognition at the kindergarten level, but not for word reading and spelling from dictation at a Grade 3 level.

Cross-linguistic influence of phonological awareness and phonological recoding skills in Chinese reading acquisition among early adolescent students

This study investigated crosslinguistic phonological awareness and phonological recoding skills in Chinese reading acquisition among early Chinese adolescent students. 76 Chinese children participated in this study and finished a series of reading measurements over 1 year (from Grade 5 to Grade 6). In Grade 5, they were assessed by Chinese phonological awareness (syllable, onset, rhyme, phoneme, and tone awareness), English phonological awareness (syllable, onset, and rime, phoneme awareness) as well as English and Chinese phonological recoding skills. In Grade 6, the students completed the measurement of Chinese lexical inferencing ability. Subsequent hierarchical regression analyses showed that Time 1 (Grade 5) Chinese phonological awareness and recoding skills made a joint intra-lingual contribution to later Chinese lexical inferencing ability. Moreover, English phonological recoding skills had a unique inter-lingual contribution to later Chinese lexical inferencing ability after age, nonverbal intelligence, and English phonological awareness were controlled for. Results expanded the self-teaching hypothesis to account for variations within and across languages over time and underscored the uniqueness of inter-lingual phonological recoding in later orthographic and semantic learning.

Differences and Similarities in the Contributions of Phonological Awareness, Orthographic Knowledge and Semantic Competence to Reading Fluency in Chinese School-Age Children With and Without Hearing Loss.

Compared with the large number of studies on reading of children with hearing loss (HL) in alphabetic languages, there are only a very limited number of studies on reading of Chinese-speaking children with HL. It remains unclear how phonological, orthographic, and semantic skills contribute to reading fluency of Chinese school-age children with HL. The present study explored this issue by examining the performances of children with HL on reading fluency and three linguistic skills compared with matched controls with normal hearing (NH). Specifically, twenty-eight children with HL and 28 chronological-age-matched children with NH were tested on word/sentence reading fluency (WRF/SRF), phonological awareness (PA) which was composed of onset/vowel/lexical tone awareness, orthographic knowledge (OK), and semantic competence (SC) which comprised animal word identification, pseudo-homophone detection, and word segmentation. Results showed that children with HL lagged behind their peers with NH in WRF/SRF and most of the phonological, orthographic, and semantic subskills except onset awareness and pseudo-homophone detection. Furthermore, the significant contributors to WRF differed between the two groups with PA being the significant contributor in the children with NH while OK being the significant contributor in the children with HL. However, the significant contributor to SRF did not differ between the two groups with SC being the only significant contributor. These results revealed not only between-group differences but also similarities in the relative contributions of PA, OK, and SC to reading fluency at both word and sentence levels, which has practical implications for developing better training programs to improve reading for children with HL.

Myeloarchitectonic Asymmetries of Language Regions in the Human Brain.

One prominent theory in neuroscience and psychology assumes that cortical regions for language are left hemisphere lateralized in the human brain. In the current study, we used a novel technique, quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (qMRI), to examine interhemispheric asymmetries in language regions in terms of macromolecular tissue volume (MTV) and quantitative longitudinal relaxation time (T1) maps in the living human brain. These two measures are known to reflect cortical myeloarchitecture from the microstructural perspective. One hundred and fifteen adults (55 male, 60 female) were examined for their myeloarchitectonic asymmetries of language regions. We found that the cortical myeloarchitecture of inferior frontal areas including the pars opercularis, pars triangularis, and pars orbitalis is left lateralized, while that of the middle temporal gyrus, Heschl’s gyrus, and planum temporale is right lateralized. Moreover, the leftward lateralization of myelination structure is significantly correlated with language skills measured by phonemic and speech tone awareness. This study reveals for the first time a mixed pattern of myeloarchitectonic asymmetries, which calls for a general theory to accommodate the full complexity of principles underlying human hemispheric specialization.

Suprasegmental but not segmental phonological awareness matters in understanding bilingual reading comprehension difficulties in Chinese and English: a 3-year longitudinal study.

This study examined whether, and if so how, L1 and L2 segmental and suprasegmental phonological awareness is longitudinally related to L1 and L2 reading comprehension difficulties among Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children. Using a regression approach, we identified five types of comprehenders, i.e., 11 poor-Chinese/average-English comprehenders, 19 poor-English/average-Chinese comprehenders, six poor-Chinese/poor-English comprehenders, 12 average-Chinese/average-English comprehenders, and seven good-Chinese/good-English comprehenders among 223 Grade 4 Chinese-English bilingual children who were comparable in age, nonverbal IQ, and word reading, but differed in reading comprehension. These children were compared retrospectively on segmental and suprasegmental phonological awareness in both Chinese and English for three consecutive years from Grade 2 to Grade 4. The results revealed that only Cantonese lexical tone awareness distinguished poor comprehenders from typically developing comprehenders. Specifically, the poor-English/average-Chinese comprehenders performed worse than the average-Chinese/average-English and good-Chinese/good-English comprehenders in Grades 4 and 3, but not in Grade 2; and the poor-Chinese/average-English comprehenders performed worse than the good-Chinese/good-English comprehenders in Grades 4 and 3, but not in Grade 2. These findings suggest that suprasegmental phonological awareness, especially Cantonese lexical tone awareness, is critical for both Chinese and English reading comprehension development among Hong Kong bilingual children.

Auditory cortex activity related to perceptual awareness versus masking of tone sequences

Sequences of repeating tones can be masked by other tones of different frequency. When these tone sequences are perceived, nevertheless, a prominent neural response in the auditory cortex is evoked by each tone of the sequence. When the targets are detected based on their isochrony, participants know that they are listening to the target once they detected it. To explore if the neural activity is more closely related to this detection task or to perceptual awareness, this magnetoencephalography (MEG) study used targets that could only be identified with cues provided after or before the masked target. In experiment 1, multiple mono-tone streams with jittered inter-stimulus interval were used, and the tone frequency of the target was indicated by a cue. Results showed no differential auditory cortex activity between hit and miss trials with post-stimulus cues. A late negative response for hit trials was only observed for pre-stimulus cues, suggesting a task-related component. Since experiment 1 provided no evidence for a link of a difference response with tone awareness, experiment 2 was planned to probe if detection of tone streams was linked to a difference response in auditory cortex. Random-tone sequences were presented in the presence of a multi-tone masker, and the sequence was repeated without masker thereafter. Results showed a prominent difference wave for hit compared to miss trials in experiment 2 evoked by targets in the presence of the masker. These results suggest that perceptual awareness of tone streams is linked to neural activity in auditory cortex.

Understanding Text Reading Comprehension of Chinese Students Who Are d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing: The Roles of Segmental Phonological Awareness and Suprasegmental Lexical Tone Awareness.

The authors investigated the roles of Chinese segmental (i.e., onset and rime) and suprasegmental (i.e., lexical tone) phonological awareness in Chinese text reading comprehension among 146 Chinese students in grades 3-9 who were d/Deaf and hard of hearing. All participants completed tasks involving onset and rime detection, lexical tone identification, sight word reading, text reading comprehension, nonverbal intelligence, and working memory. Path analyses showed that after controlling for age, grade, nonverbal intelligence, and working memory, segmental phonological awareness contributed both directly and indirectly (via sight word reading) to text reading comprehension, whereas suprasegmental lexical tone awareness only exerted only an indirect effect on text reading comprehension via sight word reading. These findings underscore the importance of phonological awareness in text reading comprehension for Chinese students who are d/Dhh.