Article published in:
The Acquisition of Turkish in Childhood
Edited by Belma Haznedar and F. Nihan Ketrez
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 20] 2016
► pp. 243–271

Phonological awareness in reading acquisition

Evidence from reading skills of Turkish-English successive bilingual children

| Bogaziçi University, Turkey

This study investigates phonological awareness skills of Turkish-English successive bilingual children in order to determine the predictors of success in word reading in English and Turkish. Fifty Turkish-English successive bilingual and sixteen monolingual English-speaking children participated in the study. The data were collected through multiple instruments, examining phonological awareness (PA) and word recognition in both languages. The results indicated that phonological awareness was a strong predictor of word level reading success in both Turkish and English. These data also revealed that PA followed a developmental pattern from syllables to phonemes. Additionally, both qualitative and quantitative analyses demonstrated that Turkish PA exerted an impact on English word recognition in bilingual children, suggesting cross-language transfer of PA between the two languages.

Keywords: orthographic depth, successive bilingualism, word reading, cross-language transfer, development of phonological awareness, literacy, phonological awareness
Published online: 18 November 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.20.11oza
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