Segmental and suprasegmental phonological skills in Chinese-English bilingual children with reading comprehension difficulties

Abstract

The current study set out to evaluate the phonological skills profiles of Chinese-English bilingual children who are poor in reading comprehension. A total of 282 Chinese-English bilingual children were tested on measures of segmental phonological awareness (PA), suprasegmental phonological processing, vocabulary, word reading, and reading comprehension, in both Chinese and English, as well as working memory and nonverbal intelligence. Based on the reading comprehension scores, we identified 81 children who were average readers, 16 children who were poor in Chinese reading comprehension (PC), 11 children who were poor in English reading comprehension (PE), and 20 children who were poor in both Chinese and English reading comprehension (PB). With regard to relavent non-verbal intelligence, vocabulary, word reading, and working memory controlled, MANCOVAs and post-hoc analyses showed that the average and PC groups performed better than the PE and PB groups in Chinese segmental PA tasks. Additionally, the average readers outperformed the three groups of poor readers on Chinese tone awareness task. Also, the average readers performed better than the PE and PC groups in the English stress sensitivity task. To sum up, these results highlight the importance of Chinese tone awareness in reading processing. Also, poor L2 English stress sensitivity is also associated with reading comprehension difficulties in L1 Chinese.