How Chinese–English Bilingual Fourth Graders Draw on Syntactic Awareness in Reading Comprehension: Within‐ and Cross‐Language Effects

Abstract This study examined the development of vowel categories in young Mandarin -English bilingual children. The participants included 35 children aged between 3 and 4 years old (15 Mandarin-English bilinguals, six English monolinguals, and 14 Mandarin monolinguals). The bilingual children were divided into two groups: one group had a shorter duration (<1 year) of intensive immersion in English (Bi-low group) and one group had a longer duration (>1 year) of intensive immersion in English (Bi-high group). The participants were recorded producing one list of Mandarin words containing the vowels /a, i, u, y, ɤ/ and/or one list of English words containing the vowels /i, ɪ, e, ɛ, æ, u, ʊ, o, ɑ, ʌ/. Formant frequency values were extracted at five equidistant time locations (the 20–35–50–65–80% point) over the course of vowel duration. Cross-language and within-language comparisons were conducted on the midpoint formant values and formant trajectories. The results showed that children in the Bi-low group produced their English vowels into clusters and showed positional deviations from the monolingual targets. However, they maintained the phonetic features of their native vowel sounds well and mainly used an assimilatory process to organize the vowel systems. Children in the Bi-high group separated their English vowels well. They used both assimilatory and dissimilatory processes to construct and refine the two vowel systems. These bilingual children approximated monolingual English children to a better extent than the children in the Bi-low group. However, when compared to the monolingual peers, they demonstrated observable deviations in both L1 and L2.

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Phrase-Reading Mediates Between Words and Syntax in Struggling Adolescent Readers

Communication Disorders Quarterly ◽

10.1177/1525740119825616 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 41 (3) ◽

pp. 162-175 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Patsy Nomvete ◽

Susan R. Easterbrooks

Keyword(s):

Reading Comprehension ◽

Struggling Readers ◽

Reading Ability ◽

Reading Rate ◽

Hierarchical Regression ◽

Syntactic Awareness ◽

Adolescent Readers ◽

Struggling Adolescent Readers ◽

Positive Significant Correlation ◽

Passage Reading

The components involved in adolescent reading are complex and not clearly understood in struggling readers. Phrase reading, a language skill associated with prosodic understanding of syntactic phrases, has received little attention. We studied 70 adolescent readers including delayed readers to answer the following questions: (a) Do phrase-reading ability, syntactic awareness, passage-reading rate, and reading comprehension have a positive, significant correlation; (b) Do language-related variables (i.e., phrasing ability, syntactic awareness) account for more of the variance in comprehension than passage-reading rate; (c) Does phrase-reading ability, as measured by phrase-level prosody, provide a mechanism for, or at least partially mediate, how passage-reading rate and syntactic awareness affect reading comprehension? Data were analyzed using hierarchical regression and mediation regression. All answers were affirmative suggesting that researchers studying adolescent struggling readers should investigate prosodic phrasing-reading ability as a tool for improving reading comprehension.

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Early emergence of syntactic awareness and cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children’s judgments

International Journal of Bilingualism ◽

10.1177/1367006911425818 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 15 (4) ◽

pp. 521-534 ◽

Cited By ~ 12

Author(s):

Cassandra Foursha-Stevenson ◽

Elena Nicoladis

Keyword(s):

Syntactic Structure ◽

Language Choice ◽

Preschool Age ◽

Bilingual Children ◽

Metalinguistic Awareness ◽

Syntactic Awareness ◽

Grammaticality Judgment ◽

English Bilingual ◽

French And English ◽

Better Than

Bilingual children sometimes perform better than same-aged monolingual children on metalinguistic awareness tasks, such as a grammaticality judgment. Some of these differences can be attributed to bilinguals having to learn to control attention to language choice. This study tested the hypothesis that bilingual children, as young as preschool age, would score overall higher than monolingual children on a grammaticality judgment test. French–English bilingual preschoolers judged the acceptability of three constructions in French and English (i.e. adjective–noun ordering, obligatoriness of a determiner, and object pronoun placement). Their performance was compared with that of a group of age-matched English monolinguals. The results showed that the bilingual children scored higher than the monolingual children. These results demonstrate that syntactic awareness develops quite early for bilinguals. Additionally, the bilingual children demonstrated cross-linguistic influence of core syntactic structure in French, as their judgments were affected by English acceptability.

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The Effects of Long-Term Vocabulary Instruction on Reading Comprehension: A Replication

Journal of Reading Behavior ◽

10.1080/10862968309547474 ◽

1983 ◽

Vol 15 (1) ◽

pp. 3-18 ◽

Cited By ~ 130

Author(s):

Margaret G. McKeown ◽

Isabel L. Beck ◽

Richard C. Omanson ◽

Charles A. Perfetti

Keyword(s):

Reading Comprehension ◽

Lexical Access ◽

Fourth Graders ◽

Vocabulary Instruction ◽

Original Study ◽

Word Knowledge ◽

Comprehension Ability ◽

Methodological Problems ◽

The Relationship

A study that investigated the relationship between vocabulary instruction and reading comprehension was replicated and extended. The original study showed substantial gains in accuracy of word knowledge and speed of lexical access, but only marginal gains in comprehension. This latter result was attributable to methodological problems, and thus the comprehension measure was revised. In the present study, fourth graders were taught 104 words over a five-month period. Following instruction, these children and a group of uninstructed children matched on pre-instruction vocabulary and comprehension ability performed tasks to measure accuracy of word knowledge, speed of lexical access, and comprehension of stories containing taught words. Instructed children showed substantial advantage in all tasks. Reasons for these results, in contrast to studies that have failed to improve comprehension through vocabulary instruction, are discussed.

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On Taiwanese pupils’ ability to differentiate between English /l/ and /r/: A study of L1/L2 cross-language effects

First Language ◽

10.1177/0142723717709106 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 37 (5) ◽

pp. 500-517 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Evelyn Eika ◽

Yining Hsieh

Keyword(s):

East Asia ◽

South East Asia ◽

Discrimination Experiment ◽

Language Effects ◽

Cross Language ◽

Better Than

Students in South East Asia often struggle with English /l/ and /r/. This study therefore set out to examine how Taiwanese pupils’ perception of these sounds is influenced by cross-language effects. Most Taiwanese students have Mandarin as L1 and Taiwanese as L2 or vice versa, and English as L3. A same–different discrimination experiment was conducted to measure pupils’ ability to discriminate between phonetically close English /r/ and /l/ and Mandarin /ʐ / and /l/. The results show that L1-Mandarin pupils discriminate both the English consonant contrast and the Mandarin consonant contrast better than L1-Taiwanese pupils. Discrimination difficulty may be higher if two members of a contrast are perceived as belonging to a single L1 category.

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Language contact within the speaker: Phonetic variation and crosslinguistic influence

10.31219/osf.io/jhsfc ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Khia A. Johnson ◽

Molly Babel

Keyword(s):

Language Contact ◽

Mutual Influence ◽

Spontaneous Speech ◽

Recent Model ◽

Phonetic Variation ◽

English Bilingual ◽

Speech Communities ◽

Crosslinguistic Influence ◽

Cross Language ◽

Language Influence

A recent model of sound change posits that the direction of change is determined, at least in part, by the distribution of variation within speech communities (Harrington, Kleber, Reubold, Schiel, & Stevens, 2018; Harrington & Schiel, 2017). We explore this model in the context of bilingual speech, asking whether the less variable language constrains phonetic variation in the more variable language, using a corpus of spontaneous speech from early Cantonese-English bilinguals (Johnson, Babel, Fong, & Yiu, 2020). As predicted, given the phonetic distributions of stop obstruents in Cantonese compared to English, intervocalic English /b d g/ were produced with less voicing for Cantonese-English bilinguals and word-final English /t k/ were more likely to be unreleased compared to spontaneous speech from two monolingual English control corpora (Pitt, Johnson, Hume, Kiesling, & Raymond, 2005; Swan, 2016). Cantonese phonology is more gradient in terms of voicing initial obstruents (Clumeck, Barton, Macken, & Huntington, 1981; W. Y. P. Wong, 2006) than permitting releases of final obstruents, which is categorically prohibited Bauer & Benedict (2011); Khouw & Ciocca (2006). Neither Cantonese-English bilingual initial voicing nor word-final stop release patterns were significantly impacted by language mode. These results provide evidence that the phonetic variation in crosslinguistically linked categories in bilingual speech is shaped by the distribution of phonetic variation within each language, thus suggesting a mechanistic account for why some segments are more susceptible to cross-language influence than others in studies of mutual influence.

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FOURTH GRADERS' PERFORMANCE ON A STATE-MANDATED ASSESSMENT INVOLVING TWO DIFFERENT MEASURES OF READING COMPREHENSION

Reading Psychology ◽

10.1080/02702710490435727 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 25 (2) ◽

pp. 121-148 ◽

Cited By ~ 22

Author(s):

LOUISE SPEAR-SWERLING

Keyword(s):

Reading Comprehension ◽

Fourth Graders

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