Within- and cross-language contributions of syntactic awareness to Chinese and English reading comprehension in Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children

Abstract

Purpose: This study examined the within- and cross-language contributions of Chinese and English syntactic awareness to Chinese and English reading comprehension among Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children. Method: A total of 227 Grade 4 Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual were tested on parallel tasks of syntactic awareness, vocabulary, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, word reading and reading comprehension in Chinese and English, as well as nonverbal IQ and working memory. Syntactic awareness was assessed using newly designed word order tasks to evaluate children’s sensitivity to the same syntactic structure (namely, same syntactic structure awareness) or different syntactic structure (namely, different syntactic structure awareness) between Chinese and English, Results: Syntactic awareness was uniquely associated with reading comprehension in both Chinese and English. A significant cross-language contribution of syntactic awareness to reading comprehension was also observed in both Chinese and English even after controlling for nonverbal IQ, working memory, vocabulary, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and word reading. Furthermore, the same and different syntactic structures in Chinese uniquely contributed to English reading comprehension. However, the same structure in English seems uniquely predicted Chinese reading comprehension. These findings highlight the importance of syntactic awareness in one language to reading comprehension in another language among Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children.