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Article published In:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 11:3 (2021) ► pp.418–451

Differences in phonological awareness performance

Are there positive or negative effects of bilingual experience?

ORCID logo | Radboud University, Nijmegen
| Radboud University, Nijmegen
ORCID logo | Radboud University, Nijmegen
| Radboud University, Nijmegen
| Radboud University, Nijmegen
Children who have knowledge of two languages may show better phonological awareness than their monolingual peers (e.g. Bruck & Genesee, 1995). It remains unclear how much bilingual experience is needed for such advantages to appear, and whether differences in language or cognitive skills alter the relation between bilingualism and phonological awareness. These questions were investigated in this cross-sectional study. Participants (n = 294; 4–7 year-olds, in the first three grades of primary school) were Dutch-speaking pupils attending mainstream monolingual Dutch primary schools or early-English schools providing English lessons from grade 1, and simultaneous Dutch-English bilinguals. We investigated phonological awareness (rhyming, phoneme blending, onset phoneme identification, and phoneme deletion) and its relation to age, Dutch vocabulary, English vocabulary, working memory and short-term memory, and the balance between Dutch and English vocabulary. Small significant (α < .05) effects of bilingualism were found on onset phoneme identification and phoneme deletion, but post-hoc comparisons revealed no robust pairwise differences between the groups. Furthermore, effects of bilingualism sometimes disappeared when differences in language or memory skills were taken into account. Learning two languages simultaneously is not beneficial to – and importantly, also not detrimental to – phonological awareness.
Keywords: early-English education, bilingualism, phonological awareness, vocabulary, memory
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Development of phonological awareness in monolinguals and bilinguals
    • 1.2Phonological awareness advantages for dual language learners
    • 1.3Other factors that may influence phonological awareness performance
    • 1.4Context of the current study
    • 1.5Research aims and hypotheses
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Instruments
      • 2.2.1Phonological awareness
      • 2.2.2Rhyming
      • 2.2.3Phoneme blending
      • 2.2.4Onset phoneme identification
      • 2.2.5Phoneme deletion
      • 2.2.6Vocabulary
      • 2.2.7Working memory
      • 2.2.8Short-term memory
    • 2.3Procedure
    • 2.4Analyses
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Including covariates in the model
  • 4.Discussion and conclusion
    • 4.1Limitations and future research
    • 4.2Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 29 October 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.18082.gor
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