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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

| Boğaziçi University, Turkey
| Boğaziçi University, Turkey
| Boğaziçi 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: phonological awareness, development of phonological awareness, literacy, word reading, cross-language transfer, successive bilingualism, orthographic depth
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Phonological awareness
    • 1.2The present study
  • 2. Method
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Instruments
      • 2.2.1Tasks used in English
      • 2.2.2Tasks used in Turkish
    • 2.3Procedure
    • 2.4Data analyses
    • 3.Results
    • 3.1Initial Analyses
    • 3.2Correlational analyses among variables
    • 3.3Regression analyses
    • 3.4Error analyses and development of phonological awareness
    • 3.5Cross-linguistic transfer
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1The role of phonological awareness in word reading
    • 4.2Development of PA
    • 4.3Phonological awareness and cross-language transfer
  • 5.Conclusion
  • 6.Limitations of the study
  • References
Published online: 18 November 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.20.11oza
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