Syllable, Phoneme, and Tone: Psycholinguistic Units in Early Chinese and English Word Recognition.

The study aimed at investigating whether the phonological skills in Chinese would facilitate the reading in a second language (a process known as phonological transfer). In the period between 2004 and 2005, 211 Hong Kong Chinese participants were tested twice on both phonological skills in Chinese (syllable deletion, syllable onset deletion, tone awareness), and Chinese and English word reading. The children were about 4.5 years old in the first testing and 5 years old in the second testing. Results indicated that phonological awareness in general was related to both Chinese and English word reading. In particular, the relationship between Chinese word reading and tone awareness, a characteristic of Chinese but not English, was much stronger than that between English word reading and tone awareness. On the other hand, the syllable-onset deletion, which is emphasized in English but not Chinese, was related to English word reading more than to Chinese word reading. Syllable awareness itself was moderately associated with reading in both languages. These results gave support the idea of phonological transfer between languages, and show that the transfer depends in part on the characteristics of the given languages. Educators who want to improve children’s word reading should therefore pay special attention to the kind of phonological awareness that will best facilitate a particular language. 　　

 

McBride-Chang, C., Tong, X., Shu, H., Wong, A. M.-Y., Leung, K., & Tardif, T. (2008). Syllable, Phoneme, and Tone: Psycholinguistic Units in Early Chinese and English Word Recognition. Scientific Studies of Reading, 12, 171-194.