Psycholinguistic Units in Early Chinese and - Psy.cuhk.edu.hk

Syllable, Phoneme, and Tone:Psycholinguistic Units in Early Chinese

and English Word Recognition

Catherine McBride-Chang and Xiuli TongThe Chinese University of Hong Kong

Hua ShuState Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neurosciences and Learning,

Beijing Normal University

Anita M.-Y. WongThe University of Hong Kong

Ka-wai LeungThe Chinese University of Hong Kong

Twila TardifUniversity of Michigan

Tasks of word reading in Chinese and English; nonverbal IQ; speeded naming; andunits of syllable onset (a phoneme measure), syllable, and tone detection awarenesswere administered to 211 Hong Kong Chinese children ages 4 and 5. In separate re-gression equations, syllable awareness was equally associated with Chinese andEnglish word recognition. In contrast, syllable onset awareness was uniquely asso-ciated with English reading only, whereas tone detection was uniquely associatedwith Chinese reading only. Results underscore both the universality of first-lan-guage phonological transfer to second-language reading and the importance of dif-ferent psycholinguistic units (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005) for understanding read-ing acquisition: Tone units are integral to Chinese character recognition, whereas

SCIENTIFIC STUDIES OF READING, 12(2), 171–194Copyright © 2008 Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1088-8438 print / 1532-799X onlineDOI: 10.1080/10888430801917290

Correspondence should be sent to Catherine McBride-Chang, Psychology Department, The Chi-nese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong. E-mail: [email protected]

phonemes are more strongly associated with English word recognition, even withinthe same children.

The importance of phonological awareness, which is the ability to reflect on thesound structure of language (Mattingly, 1972), lies primarily in its link to wordrecognition. However, there is an ongoing debate about whether awareness of dif-ferent-sized psycholinguistic units is crucial for understanding this link (e.g.,Goswami & Bryant, 1990; Muter, Hulme, Snowling, & Stevenson, 2004; Muter,Hulme, Snowling, & Taylor, 1997) or whether differences in phonological aware-ness across such units are simply variations within a core construct (e.g., Anthony& Lonigan, 2004). In this study, we addressed this issue by testing the associationsof word recognition to three different psycholinguistic units, syllable, syllable on-set (a measure of awareness of the first phoneme of the syllable), and lexical tone.These units of phonological awareness were examined in relation to word recogni-tion in two orthographies that vary substantially in their representations of phonol-ogy, English and Chinese, in the same children. We tested the idea that, althoughawareness of phonemes tends to be strongly correlated with word recognition inEnglish (e.g., Adams, 1990; Castles & Coltheart, 2004; Perfetti, Beck, Bell, &Hughes, 1987), awareness of lexical tone is more integrally associated with Chi-nese word recognition. In contrast, syllable awareness may be important for earlyreading of both Chinese and English. These ideas are based in part on psy-cholinguistic grain size theory (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005), which suggests thatthe way in which speech is represented by a given orthography influences the im-portance of different psycholinguistic units for word recognition in that script.

Somewhat in contrast to this psycholinguistic grain size theory, a conceptual-ization of phonological awareness as representing a single core construct acrossphonological units (e.g., Anthony & Lonigan, 2004) is defensible given that (a)most spoken languages, including both Chinese and English, are divisible at leastinto units of syllables, syllable onsets, and rhymes and (b) all such units tend to bepositively associated with word recognition across orthographies. Thus, severalstudies have found positive associations of such units to word recognition acrossorthographies, including both English (e.g., for a review, see Ziegler & Goswami,2005) and Chinese (e.g., Ho & Bryant, 1997; Hu & Catts, 1998; McBride-Chang& Kail, 2002; Siok & Fletcher, 2001). Apart from these universal psycholinguisticunits, some (e.g., M. Wang, Perfetti, & Liu, 2005) have further demonstrated thateven characteristics of language that are not universals, such as lexical tone aware-ness, a salient feature of Chinese, tend to be positively associated with pseudowordreading in English, suggesting that there may be phonological transfer at multiplelevels across languages. Given this result and the claims of Anthony and Loniganthat phonological awareness is best represented as a unitary construct among Eng-lish-speaking children ages 2 to 7, there is some justification for considering

172 McBRIDE-CHANG ET AL.

awareness of any psycholinguistic unit to be a reasonable proxy for general phono-logical awareness. From this perspective, there is little reason to debate the relativemerits of measures of awareness of different psycholinguistic units for early readingacquisition. Furthermore, in this interpretation, (e.g., Anthony & Lonigan, 2004; M.Wang et al., 2005), there may be little reason to consider different-sized phonologi-cal units in relation to word recognition in either a first language (L1) or second lan-guage (L2).

However, the question of whether different phonological units may have differ-ent associations with reading remains both theoretically and practically meaning-ful, particularly for orthographies such as Chinese that represent larger phonologi-cal units. Theoretically, models of reading should distinguish those aspects ofphonological awareness that are likely bidirectionally associated with reading de-velopment as compared to those that are merely associated with reading acquisi-tion. It is possible that all units of phonological awareness are positively correlatedwith word recognition but that only particular units of phonological awareness arebidirectionally associated with early reading skill (e.g., Castles & Coltheart, 2004)because of the varying units involved in learning to read in different orthographies.That is, although children vary systematically in phonological awareness acrosspsycholinguistic units, only those units that are relevant for reading in a given or-thography may facilitate or interact with word recognition.

This idea is highlighted in research studies demonstrating the importance ofthe psycholinguistic unit of the syllable for reading acquisition in diverse scripts.For example, one study of children’s reading of Greek (Adinis & Nunes, 2001)demonstrated that both syllable and phoneme awareness independently ex-plained word recognition. Thus, apart from phonemic awareness, syllable aware-ness may be additionally useful for early Greek word recognition because of thenature of the Greek language and script. An even stronger demonstration of theimportance of larger units came from a study of Chinese children that found thatsyllable, but not syllable onset, awareness best explained variability in Chinesecharacter acquisition across cultures (McBride-Chang, Bialystok, Chong, & Li,2004). A further example of the primacy of the syllable in some orthographiescomes from a longitudinal study of children’s Korean Hangul recognition, whichdemonstrated that, even with previous Hangul recognition statistically con-trolled, second-grade syllable awareness uniquely predicted third-grade KoreanHangul recognition; syllable onset awareness did not (Cho & McBride-Chang,2005). Across these studies, both syllable awareness and syllable onset aware-ness were individually positively associated with word recognition. However, insome cases, despite this general positive correlation, syllable onset awarenessfailed to account for unique variance in word recognition. Collectively, thesestudies suggest that syllable awareness may be fundamental for early reading insome orthographies, not merely as an early precursor to phoneme awareness(e.g., Treiman & Zukowski, 1991), as is typically assumed for English (e.g.,

EARLY CHINESE AND ENGLISH WORD RECOGNITION 173

Anthony & Lonigan, 2004), but as a unique phonological unit that maps clearlyonto the corresponding orthographic unit.

Indeed, from the perspective of psycholinguistic grain size theory (Ziegler &Goswami, 2005), syllable awareness is relevant for early English word recognitionas well, because even within alphabetic orthographies, the more phonologically in-consistent a script is, the more syllable and other larger phonological units matterfor early reading acquisition. As Ziegler and Goswami stated,

When small-grain correspondences are inconsistent (e.g., English) or not available(e.g., Chinese), beginning readers have to learn additional correspondences for largerorthographic units, such as syllables, rimes, or whole words. … Inconsistent orthog-raphies like English appear to push readers into developing both small unit and largeunit recoding strategies in parallel. (p. 19)

Learning such correspondences begins with an awareness of such units in orallanguage. Given these ideas, in our study of beginning readers, whose L1 (Chi-nese) highlights the syllable in both language and script, one might therefore antic-ipate that the syllable unit of awareness might be strongly salient both for Englishand Chinese word recognition.

In contrast to the shared importance of the syllable-level psycholinguistic unitfor beginning reading in both English and Chinese, the phoneme unit of phonolog-ical awareness may be more specialized for English only. As compared to Chinese,English has a more complex phonological structure at the level of the phoneme.For example, consonant clusters, which are relatively common in English, arevirtually nonexistent in Chinese. Cantonese has a simple syllabic structure of(C)V(C); 98% of all Cantonese words are of CVC and CV structures (Wong,1984). The alphabetic principle also dictates that children who learn to associateindividual phonemes, or smaller grain sizes, with letters will learn to read more ef-ficiently than those who do not in alphabetic orthographies (Zielger & Goswami,2005). Although English is a relatively inconsistent alphabetic orthography, pho-nemic awareness has a clear bidirectional association with word recognition inEnglish at various points in development (e.g., Adams, 1990; Castles & Coltheart,2004; Perfetti et al., 1987; Ziegler & Goswami, 2005).

On the other hand, lexical tone is a dimension of language absent from Englishand highly specialized in Cantonese, the Chinese language of this study. Tone is anessential aspect of the syllable in Chinese. Across every syllable, tone distin-guishes meanings of syllables with an identical phonological structure. In Canton-ese, tone can be conceptualized as high-level, mid-level, low-level, high-rising,low-rising, and low falling (Chao, 1947, Hashimoto-Yue, 1972, Zee, 1999). Forexample, across syllables sharing /fu/ as their phonological structure, changes inmeaning are created by tone contrasts, for example, /fu1/ (husband), /fu2/

(tiger), /fu3/ (trousers), /fu4/ (symbol), /fu5/ (woman), /fu6/ (fa-


ther). Thus, in Chinese, tone provides important information for making semanticcontrasts and is integral to every spoken word (Ho & Bryant, 1997; W. S-Y. Wang,1973). In addition, most syllables can be represented in Chinese with multipletones (Duanmu, 2006). Therefore, merely knowing the phonological structure of asyllable in the absence of tone is not effective in distinguishing its meaning in lan-guage and, by extension, in print. Tone appears to develop relatively early in nativeCantonese speakers as evidenced by the few errors in tone production made byCantonese-speaking children even before the age of 2 (So & Dodd, 1995).

However, the extent to which lexical tone processing is associated with readingacross orthographies has only rarely been considered. One study using event-re-lated potentials distinguished tone processing among speakers learning a tonal andnontonal language. The study demonstrated that native Mandarin speakers processtone in the left hemisphere, whereas English speakers, who have not had prior ex-perience with tonal languages, process tone bilaterally (Y. Wang, Jongman &Sereno, 2001). Hence, the relevance of linguistic tone information to language—and, by extension, reading—may differ across languages.

From the perspective of psycholinguistic grain size theory (Ziegler & Gos-wami, 2005), it is also unclear how to conceptualize tones, as large versus smallunits. Within a Chinese syllable, the rime is affected by the tone, distinguishingmeaning across words. Unlike most phonemes in English or syllables in Chinese,tone is not explicitly represented in text in the sense of being marked with consis-tent symbols signifying a designated tone. On the other hand, a change in tone canresult in a completely different word, and syllables with different tones are indi-cated in print with different characters. In a sense, then, each printed character,which brings with it its own pronunciation inclusive of tone, implicitly communi-cates both syllable and tone information simultaneously. Furthermore, when iso-lated characters are paired together, pronunciation of tone across the word canchange. This change refers to sandhi (Duanmu, 2006), similar to the idea ofcoarticulation rules in English. A crude analogy in English might be the fact thatthe letter t is represented as an aspirated /t/ in top but a nonaspirated /t/ in water.Thus, context affects tone pronunciation. Given the impact of tone on both recog-nition of isolated characters and characters within the context of words andphrases, it is essential to consider tone a fundamental aspect of phonological sensi-tivity in Chinese. As in some other aspects of phonological awareness, such as syl-lables in English, although tone is not explicitly marked in text, sensitivity to thislinguistic aspect may facilitate reading in Chinese.

Although others (e.g., Siok & Fletcher, 2001) have suggested that tone is impor-tant for Chinese word recognition, few have actually included tasks of tone aware-ness in their own studies. Of those who have included such a measure in their re-search on Chinese reading development (Chen et al., 2004; Fu & Huang, 2000; Ho& Bryant, 1997; Hu & Catts, 1998; Leong, Cheng, & Tan, 2005; M. Wang etal., 2005), few have explicitly compared multiple measures of phonological


awareness. Given the importance of syllable awareness for early Chinese word rec-ognition, a comparison across units of syllable and tone detection awareness maybe particularly important for understanding early Chinese character recognition.Would both phonological units be uniquely associated with Chinese reading in be-ginning readers?

Apart from the theoretical importance of exploring different units of phonologi-cal awareness across languages, such an exploration is of practical importance forboth L1s and L2s. For example, different phonological units may be useful in de-signing remediation methods for children with reading problems or uncoveringuseful indicators for those at risk for reading disability. In Korean, a focus on sylla-ble awareness may facilitate early Hangul recognition, whereas a focus on pho-neme awareness may be more useful for English word recognition (Cho &McBride-Chang, 2005). Perhaps more surprisingly, M. Wang et al. (2005) arguedthat training in Chinese tone awareness may help Chinese children to learn to readEnglish better based on their finding of a significant association of tone awarenessto English word recognition. Given the absence of lexical tone in English, this sug-gestion is controversial. This suggestion also underscores the potential importanceand influence of phonological transfer, the concept that phonological awareness inone language may facilitate phonological awareness—and, by extension, read-ing—in an L2.

Given that the role of phonological awareness varies across orthographies(Treiman & Zukowski, 1991), some have suggested that the degree of overlap be-tween L1 and L2 and orthographies might determine the phonological transferprocess (Geva & Wade-Woolley, 1998; Geva, Wade-Woolley, & Shany, 1997). In-deed, several studies of L2 reading suggest that L1 phonological awareness can ex-plain L2 reading, using phonological units that conform either very closely (e.g.,Comeau, Cormier, Grandmaison, & Lacroix, 1999; Durgunoglu, Nagy, & Han-cin-Bhatt, 1993) or less closely (e.g., Gottardo, Yan, Siegel, & Wade-Woolley,2001; M. Wang et al., 2005) to the demands of the L2 orthography. Because thereare more studies that focus on phonological transfer across languages that sharemore similar grain size psycholinguistic units across scripts (i.e., alphabets), suchas English and French (e.g., Bruck & Genesee, 1995; Comeau et al., 1999) Englishand Spanish (e.g., Cisero & Royer, 1995; Durgunoglu, Nagy, & Hancin-Bhatt,1993; Lindsey, Manis, & Bailey, 2003), or English and Urdu (e.g., Mumtaz &Humphreys, 2001), it is useful to compare explicitly psycholinguistic units inscripts that vary greatly in the grain size to be learned.

Thus, what is unique about our study as compared to previous ones is that wecompared the strengths of three different phonological awareness measures, in-cluding tone awareness, simultaneously in relation to reading two orthographies inthe same children. This research considers the role of psycholinguistic units inreading across languages, incorporating concepts from both psycholinguistic grainsize theory (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005) and phonological transfer (e.g., Comeau etal., 1999; Durgunoglu et al., 1993; Gottardo et al., 2001; M. Wang et al., 2005).


Our study is an extension of previous work (McBride-Chang et al., 2004; M. Wanget al., 2005) on units of phonological awareness in Chinese and English. Previousresearch has demonstrated that, relative to syllable onset awareness, syllableawareness is more strongly associated with early Chinese character recognition(McBride-Chang et al., 2004). However, that study did not include tone awareness,arguably a hallmark of Chinese processing. M. Wang et al., in contrast, found thattone awareness was uniquely associated with English pseudoword reading in Chi-nese children, with phoneme awareness controlled, in Mandarin-speaking gradeschool children who had learned Pinyin, a phonological alphabetic coding systemused to teach Chinese in China. However, in that study, children’s ages and gradelevels, which varied fairly substantially, were not statistically controlled in theanalyses. In addition, no measure of syllable awareness, a potentially importantearly indicator of Chinese word recognition, was included. Thus, as a replicationand extension of that study, in our study three levels of phonological awareness—syllable, syllable onset, and tone detection—were tested in relation to word recog-nition in both Chinese and English among Cantonese kindergartners.

We also included a measure of speeded naming in our study because it has beenlinked to early word recognition across orthographies (e.g., Ho & Lai, 1999;Wimmer, Mayringer, & Landerl, 2000). Although this measure was not a main focusof our study, the clinical relevance of speeded naming tasks for understanding read-ing development and impairment is well established. Precisely what speeded nam-ing tasks are measuring remains somewhat unclear, but to the extent that they tapphonological-processing skills (e.g., Wagner & Torgesen, 1987), we incorporatedone such measure as a stringent control to underscore the importance of differentlevels of phonological awareness across Chinese and English word recognition.

Thus, the focus of our study was on how three psycholinguistic units—syllableonset, syllable, and tone—were associated with word recognition in Chinese andEnglish in the same children. Based on previous studies (M. Wang et al., 2005), weexpected that all tasks of phonological awareness would be positively associatedwith reading in both Chinese and English. At the same time, however, althoughsyllable awareness appears to be important for reading of both Chinese and Eng-lish, at least in very early literacy development, tone detection was hypothesized tobe more strongly associated with Chinese and syllable onset (i.e., phoneme)awareness more strongly associated with English word recognition given the con-straints of each orthography (e.g., Ziegler & Goswami, 2005).

METHOD

Participants

Participants were 211 (94 boys, 117 girls) Hong Kong Chinese children who hadbeen tested two times in a longitudinal study from 2004 to 2005. For Time 1 inSeptember to December 2004, the children’s mean age was 53.16 months (SD =


3.49). For Time 2 in June to August 2005, the children’s mean age was 61.24months (SD = 3.59). All children were native Cantonese speakers and startedlearning English from age 3 at school. They were healthy and normal in cognitivedevelopment without any family history of hearing impairment or congenital mal-formations. Children were originally recruited from five Maternal and Child Hear-ing Centres located in five regions across Hong Kong and attended a variety of kin-dergartens across the city.

In Hong Kong, virtually all children attend kindergarten schools from age 3.These schools are 3-year separate educational institutions with their own systems,separate from primary schools. Kindergartens begin teaching English to childrenfrom the beginning of K1, which is first-year kindergarten. They typically teachEnglish for approximately 30 to 45 min per school day. Most kindergarten classesmeet for approximately 3 hr daily. Some English lessons may be taught by nativeEnglish teachers, but most such lessons are taught by trained Hong Kong teachers.Lessons combine oral and written English so that children typically learn to recog-nize some English words by the beginning of K2, or second-year kindergarten.Hong Kong kindergarten students typically spend approximately 30 to 45 minlearning to read Chinese from the second semester of K1 as well. Reading instruc-tion for both English and Chinese typically emphasizes memorization of words(termed “look and say”; Holm & Dodd, 1996), rather than teaching of phonics.That is, unlike many other cultures around the world, letter sounds are not typicallytaught to children learning to read English, and no phonological coding systemmarking either phonemes or tones is used as an aid to teach Chinese reading inHong Kong. Thus, although reading skills in both Chinese and English tend to bevery high among Hong Kong Chinese children, phonological awareness tends tobe particularly low in this group, both for adults (e.g., Holm & Dodd, 1996) andchildren (e.g., McBride-Chang et al., 2004).

Procedures

A consent form from the parents included the children in this study was obtained,and a convenient testing time for the children and their caregiver was arranged in-dividually for every family that agreed to participate. The children were individu-ally tested at home by trained psychology majors. All tests included in our studywere administered in a single session that lasted about 1 to 1.5 hr. Although ourmain focus was on units of phonological awareness in Chinese in relation to read-ing achievement in both Chinese and English, we also measured speeded namingskill in addition to knowledge of vocabulary definitions and Raven’s Colored Pro-gressive Matrices (Raven, Court, & Raven, 1995) to control for children’s generalverbal and nonverbal reasoning, respectively.

Measures administered are described next.


Chinese character recognition. Two tests were used to examine children’scharacter recognition by asking them to read aloud the characters one by one.Twenty-seven single Chinese characters and 34 two-character words made up thefirst test, which was adopted from previous studies among Hong Kong Chinesekindergartners (Ho & Bryant, 1997; McBride-Chang & Ho, 2000). The second testincluded 150 two-character words taken from the Hong Kong Test of SpecificLearning Difficulties in Reading and Writing (Ho, Chan, Tsang, & Lee, 2000).The testing stopped when the child failed to recognize either 10 consecutive wordsin the first test or, if the child went on to the second instrument, 15 consecutivewords on the second test. Across both tests, children received a 1 for correctly pro-nouncing the item and a 0 for incorrectly naming the word. This task was adminis-tered at both Times 1 and 2.

Raven’s Progressive Matrices. At Time 1 only, the book form of the Ra-ven’s Colored Progressive Matrices was administered to children as an estimate ofnonverbal IQ (Raven et al., 1995). Twenty-four colorful items of similar difficultywere presented in two sets of 12 each. Each item consisted of one big figure with aportion of the pattern removed. Children were asked to match the correct portion ofthe pattern from among six choices to complete the figure. The maximum scorewas 24.

Vocabulary definitions. This task was designed to tap children’s vocabularyknowledge. The task consisted of 53 words. All words were adopted from HongKong Chinese children’s reading books (Zhuang, 2000). In this task, children wereasked to give a definition or explanation of each word. The words were arranged inan increasing order of difficulty. All words in the task were piloted with children ofsimilar ages. The marking scheme for the task was adopted from the Stan-ford-Binet Intelligence Scale vocabulary subtest (Thorndike, Hagen, & Sattler,1986) that had been translated into Chinese in Hong Kong. A scoring scheme foreach word was developed with reference to a Chinese dictionary (Lau, 1999).Children’s scores for each answer were 0, 1, or 2 as a reference in the scheme. Ac-cording to the scoring scheme, 2 points were given for a synonym or a clear de-scription of the target word. One point was allotted for an ambiguous answer or anexample given to describe the target word. A score of zero was given for repetitionof the target word or a wrong description. For example, for the target word knife, a2-point answer is “a tool used to cut vegetables.” A 1-point answer is “a tool in thekitchen.” An example of a zero-point answer is “children can’t touch it.” Thus, thetotal possible score was 106. If the children failed in five consecutive questions, thetesting was stopped. The answers given by the children during pilot tests werecoded by two raters to measure the interrater reliability, which was 69%, κ(N =506) = .69, p < .001.


Speeded naming (of numbers). This task consisted of five rows of 5 num-bers each, for a total of 25 numbers randomly arranged on a sheet. Each row con-sisted of the same 5 single-digit numbers presented in different orders. Childrenwere first asked to name each number from the first row slowly, to ensure that allnumber names were familiar to the child. All numbers were named using Canton-ese. Children were then asked to name all 25 numbers aloud as rapidly as possible,beginning with the first number in the first row and ending with the last number ofthe last row. Total time taken to read these 25 numbers aloud was recorded using astopwatch. Errors were few and were not recorded. Children were administeredthis task twice to obtain test–retest reliability estimates.

Tone detection. The tone detection task was adapted from a study by Cioccaand Lui (2003). Two sets of six Cantonese tones were produced with the monosyl-lable /ji/ and /fu/. The stimuli of the monosyllable /ji/ were /ji1/ (clothing), /ji2/

(chair), /ji3/ (first character of spaghetti), /ji4/ (son), /ji5/ (ear), and/ji6/ (two). The stimuli of the monosyllable /fu/ were /fu1/ (skin), /fu2/(tiger), /fu3/ (trousers), /fu4/ (symbol), /fu5/ (woman), and /fu6/(father). The instructions and stimuli were pronounced by a female native Canton-ese speaker and recorded on a PC through a TASCAM 302 dual cassette recorder(TEAC, Tokyo, Japan) in a soundproof room. The computer was equipped withCool Edit Pro (Version 2.0; Adobe Systems, San Jose, CA) software, which al-lowed clear digital recording. The instructions and stimuli were then copied onto amini-disc. Children were given training before the actual experimental task began.For both sessions, the stimuli recorded on the mini-disc were presented to childrenvia headsets connected to a Sony minidisc player. During the training session, chil-dren were asked to listen to the stimuli and repeat the two sets of tones illustrated in12 pictures. They were asked to name the pictures in random order to ensure thatthe children could understand and differentiate them. During the experimental ses-sion, there were 3 trial items and 48 test items presented in a booklet. Two picturesfor a given contrastive tone pair were presented for each item, and children wereasked to select the one that corresponded to the target word they had heard. Therewere eight minimal pair tonal contrasts in total, which included High Level–MidLevel, High Level–Low Level, Mid Level–Low Level, High Level–High Rising,High Rising–Low Rising, Low Rising–Low Level, Low Falling–Low Rising, andLow Falling–Low Level. Each of the pairs was presented three times, and therefore24 items were created for each of the two monosyllables included in this study. The48 items were presented in random order, with side of picture counterbalancedwithin subjects. The maximum score was 48. The items of this task are presentedin the appendix (in Chinese).

Syllable deletion. This task consisted of 18 three-syllable words, with 3practice items and 15 testing items. The children were asked to delete a target -


syllable from orally presented three-syllable words. For example, “ /hung4luk6 dang1/ (red green light)” without “ /luk6/ (green)” would be “/hung4 dang1/ (red light).” All items were administered orally. In this task, chil-dren were required to delete the first, middle, or final syllable each across one thirdof the trials. Once five consecutive trials were failed, testing was stopped.

Syllable onset deletion. In this task, children were asked to say a sin-gle-syllable word without the first sound (i.e., consonant). All items were orallypresented to the children. For example, /caa1/ without the initial sound wouldbe /aa1/. There were 4 trial items and 16 testing items, half real words and half non-sense words.

English word reading. This task was administered to test English readingability by asking children to read aloud the words. The task, which involved read-ing a list of 30 words selected from English textbooks used in different kindergar-tens in Hong Kong, has been used successfully in previous studies to measure Eng-lish word recognition (e.g., McBride-Chang & Kail, 2002). One point was allottedfor every word correctly read aloud, and the maximum score was 30.

RESULTS

Table 1 shows means, standard deviations, and reliability estimates for all tasks ad-ministered in our study. For the speeded naming task, administered at Time 2, thereliability shown represents test–retest reliability, whereas the reliabilities of othertasks are internal consistency reliabilities. As indicated in the table, the reliabilitiesof all language-related tasks used in the study were above .70. Not surprisingly,


TABLE 1Means, Standard Deviations, and Reliabilities of Scales of the Variables

Variables (Maximum score possible) M SD Reliability

Chinese character recognition, T1 (211) 27.64 19.35 .97Chinese character recognition, T2 ( 211) 50.67 25.50 .98English word reading, T2 (30) 10.19 8.15 .94Vocabulary definitions, T2 (106) 14.36 6.74 .81Speeded naming, T2 19.25 5.62 .90Raven’s Progressive Matrices, T1 (24) 11.07 2.40 .51Syllable deletion, T2 (15) 11.26 3.68 .88Syllable onset deletion, T2 (16) .65 2.44 .96Tone detection, T2 (48) 35.06 5.36 .74

Note. N = 211. All reliabilities listed are internal consistency reliabilities except for the rapidnumber naming task, which represents a test–retest reliability. T1 = Time 1; T2 = Time 2.

given the lack of phonics teaching of any type typically taught in Hong Kong, thedistribution of the syllable onset awareness task was strongly skewed such thatonly 34 children scored above zero on this measure. The effects of such skewnessbecome relatively less strong with larger sample sizes defined as those over 100cases (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2001). Given our relatively large sample size and ourfocus on the association of the phoneme onset awareness measure along with otherphonological awareness measures to both English and Chinese word recognitionwithin the same children, we continued with our analyses using this variable. Noneof the other distributions of measures were strongly skewed.

Partial correlations (controlling for age) among all variables are shown in Table2. Predictably, Chinese character recognition at Times 1 and 2 were significantlycorrelated with all other variables measured in the study and with one another (r =.86). Chinese character recognition and English word reading at Time 2 were alsomoderately associated (r = .52). The focus of all subsequent analyses was primar-ily on associations of the phonological awareness tasks to word recognition in Chi-nese and English at Time 2.

Patterns of associations of phonological awareness tasks with word recognitionshowed a somewhat stronger association of phoneme onset awareness to Englishword reading (r = .26) than to Chinese word recognition (r = .19). Parenthetically,when we examined these associations only in those 34 children who scored 1 ormore on phoneme onset awareness, this pattern was similar (r = .32 for phoneme


TABLE 2Correlations Between Various Variables Controlling For Age

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

1. Chinese characterrecognition, T1

—

2. Chinese characterrecognition, T2

.86*** —

3. English wordreading, T2

.49*** .52*** —

4. Vocabularydefinitions, T2

.20** .19** .08 —

5. Speeded naming, T2 –.35*** –.39*** –.36*** –.12 —6. Raven’s progressive

matrices, T1.33*** .23** .17* .05 –.16* —

7. Syllable deletion, T2 .37*** .42*** .38*** .25*** –.32 .24** —8. Syllable onset

deletion, T2.23** .19** .26*** .18** –.10 .13 .14* —

9. Tone detection, T2 .40*** .42*** .24** .28*** –.23 .09 .42*** .20** —

Note. T1 = Time 1; T2 = Time 2.*p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

onset and English word recognition and r = .06 for phoneme onset with Chineseword recognition). The syllable deletion task appeared to be approximately equal-ly associated with word reading in both Chinese (r = .42) and English (r = .38). Incontrast, tone awareness was more strongly associated with Chinese character rec-ognition (r = .42) than with English word recognition (r = .24). Of all correlationscompared across scripts, only this one for tone was statistically significant (p <.01). Given this pattern of associations, we used hierarchical regression analyses totest the unique associations of each level of phonological awareness to word recog-nition in Chinese and English, as shown in Table 3.

In the regression equations shown in Table 3, vocabulary definitions, Raven’sprogressive matrices, and age were first entered into each equation explainingword recognition in Chinese and English, respectively, to control for general abil-ity and age. At Step 2, our speeded naming task explained unique variance in eachmeasure, in line with previous studies showing that speeded naming is associatedwith word recognition across diverse orthographies (e.g., Ho & Lai, 1999; Wim-mer et al., 2000). We then entered the three phonological awareness measures,yielding several patterns. First, tone detection awareness was uniquely associatedwith Chinese character recognition. Thus, from Table 3, the semipartial correlationbetween tone detection awareness and Chinese character recognition after remov-ing the effects of all other variables included was .22 (p < .001). In contrast, tonedetection awareness was not uniquely associated with English word recognition.Thus, the semipartial correlation between tone detection and English word recog-nition with other variables statistically controlled was .04 (p > .05). Second, al-though syllable onset awareness was uniquely associated with English word read-ing in the regression equation, it was not significantly associated with Chinesecharacter recognition, similar to findings from McBride-Chang et al. (2004).Finally, syllable deletion was uniquely associated with both Chinese and Englishword recognition.

A more stringent test of the strength of the phonological awareness measuresfor Chinese character recognition and English word recognition was done by per-forming the same analyses with previous Chinese word reading statistically con-trolled. In these analyses, presented in Table 4, Chinese character recognition atTime 1, vocabulary definitions, Raven’s progressive matrices, and age uniquelyexplained 76% of the variance in Chinese character reading and 24% of the vari-ance in English reading at Time 2. In Step 2, the speeded naming task was signifi-cantly associated with both Chinese and English reading. In Step 3, both syllableonset awareness and syllable awareness, but not tone detection awareness, wereuniquely associated with English word recognition. However, only syllable aware-ness was uniquely associated with Chinese word recognition in the final hierarchi-cal regression equation model. That is, when tone detection awareness was in-cluded after removing the effects of all other variables included in the equation, thesemipartial correlation between tone and Chinese character recognition was not


184

TAB

LE3

Hie

rarc

hica

lReg

ress

ion

Pre

dict

ing

Chi

nese

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ract

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nitio

nan

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tion

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Vari

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ssr

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185

TAB

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dict

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.65

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01.

significant. Final beta weights in Table 4 indicate that Chinese character recogni-tion at Time 1, speeded naming, and syllable awareness were all uniquely associ-ated with reading in both Chinese and English. For English, the syllable onset levelof awareness was an additional unique correlate.

DISCUSSION

These results highlighted two features of phonological awareness in relation toearly reading development that contribute to the debate about whether to conceptu-alize phonological awareness as a single construct (e.g., Anthony & Lonigan,2004) or to distinguish unique psycholinguistic units (e.g., Goswami & Bryant,1990; Muter et al., 2004; Muter et al., 1997; Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). Althoughthis debate regarding models of phonological awareness has generally confined it-self to reading in one’s L1, we have extended it to L2 word recognition as well withthe following conclusions: First, there is some evidence for general transfer ofphonological awareness in the L1 of Cantonese to an L2 and orthography, even oneas different as English is from Chinese, as demonstrated by the unique contributionof both tone and syllable awareness to word recognition in both Chinese and Eng-lish after statistically controlling for general knowledge, age, and speeded naming.Second, despite some evidence of general transfer, different phonological units ofawareness vary in their importance for reading across different orthographies (e.g.,Ziegler & Goswami, 2005).

One interpretation of our study’s results is that there is evidence of L1 phono-logical transfer to L2 reading. This has been demonstrated in several studies ofIndo-European languages (e.g., Comeau et al., 1999; Durgunoglu et al., 1993;Lindsey et al., 2003). It has also been established in a number of recent studies in-volving a Chinese–English contrast (e.g., Chow, McBride-Chang, & Burgess,2005; Gottardo et al., 2001; M. Wang et al., 2005). In our study, as in previousones, some tasks of phonological awareness in the native language tended to besignificantly associated both with word recognition across orthographies and withone another. In particular, even with age statistically controlled, all three pho-nological variables were significantly correlated with word recognition in bothChinese and English, though the magnitudes of some of these associations wereadmittedly small. These results, along with the positive (though modest) inter-correlations among all phonological awareness tasks, could support in some smallmeasure the idea that levels of phonological awareness may broadly represent fea-tures of the same underlying construct, at least within a language (e.g., Anthony &Lonigan, 2004). However, such a conclusion could only firmly be drawn given ananalysis of children’s performances on multiple indicators each of tone detection,syllable onset, and syllable awareness, perhaps among others, a goal for future re-search.


More immediately, our results demonstrate that the relative importance ofpsycholinguistic units for reading acquisition depends on the languages and or-thographies to be learned (Goswami, 1999). Although these data demonstratedthat syllable awareness was integral to word recognition in both Chinese and Eng-lish among these beginning readers, the importance of syllable onset awarenessand tone for reading varied strongly across orthographies.

The syllable is the simplest unit of phonological awareness (Treiman & Zukow-ski, 1991) and a universal of language processing (e.g., Boysson-Bardies, 1999).Thus, for beginning readers, awareness of the syllable may help in mapping oral towritten language across orthographies, including both Chinese and English (e.g.,McBride-Chang et al., 2004; McBride-Chang & Kail, 2002). This result is alsopredicted by the psycholinguistic grain size theory (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005),which specifically targets both English and Chinese as orthographies in which thesyllable may be important for early reading acquisition. Because English is a rela-tively unreliable alphabetic orthography in which larger sized units must some-times be learned in addition to (smaller) phoneme units, syllable awareness may beimportant for early acquisition of English word recognition. At the same time, inChinese, which only represents sound in large units, the syllable is particularlystrongly salient, both in language and in print. Therefore, it is not surprising thatsyllable awareness should have been strongly associated with early reading of bothEnglish and Chinese among young Chinese children, presumably sensitized to thesyllable unit through the L1, learning English as an L2.

In contrast, syllable onset awareness is not necessary for early Chinese wordrecognition because the phoneme is not represented in the Chinese orthography.Thus, when both syllable and phoneme awareness measures are simultaneouslyincluded in an equation to explain variance in Chinese character recognition, syl-lable onset is not significant, even when a phonological coding system such asPinyin is used to teach Chinese (McBride-Chang et al., 2004). Our study con-firmed these results in a diverse sample of Hong Kong Chinese beginning read-ers.

Perhaps the most interesting finding of our study was the relative association ofthe tone detection awareness task with early word recognition in Chinese and Eng-lish. As demonstrated previously for older children, tone awareness was signifi-cantly associated with word recognition, both in English and Chinese (e.g., M.Wang et al., 2005). However, whereas tone is integral to lexical processing in Chi-nese, it is not a unit of processing that occurs in English lexical discriminations.Therefore, it is not surprising that tone detection awareness was uniquely associ-ated with Chinese word recognition but not with English word recognition, withthe other two levels of phonological awareness included in the regression equa-tions. Ours is among the first studies to demonstrate that tone detection awarenessis uniquely associated with Chinese character recognition, even once other mea-sures of phonological awareness are taken into account.


One curiosity of our study is that, with previous Chinese character recognitionability and syllable awareness controlled, tone detection was no longer signifi-cantly associated with Time 2 Chinese character recognition. However, it shouldbe noted that tone is in some ways a component of Chinese syllable processing.That is, tone is integral to every Chinese syllable (e.g., Duanmu, 2006). Indeed, inour tasks, the association of tone to syllable awareness was relatively high (.42),underscoring the link between syllable and tone processing. Thus, although sylla-ble awareness can be distinguished from tone detection awareness in cognitivetasks, in language, these phonological units are linked. In addition, with Chinesereading at Time 1 and Time 2 so strongly linked, the variance contributed by bothsyllable and tone detection awareness was relatively small, and the differences be-tween them in this variance was subject to chance factors (final standardized betaweights of .10 vs. .06). Nevertheless, one central point of this research, that differ-ent grain-sized units may be more strongly associated with reading in one orthog-raphy as compared to another, was clearly demonstrated in these analyses. Evenwith syllable onset awareness controlled, the tone awareness task explained uniquevariance in the Chinese reading measure.

There were two limitations of our study. The first involves questions of floor ef-fects of the syllable onset task. On this task, 83% of the sample (175 children)scored 0, whereas 17% of the sample scored 1 or higher. Given that Hong Kongchildren receive no phonological coding training in learning to read, this distribu-tion is representative of previous findings (e.g, Huang & Hanley, 1995; McBride-Chang & Ho, 2005). Developmental effects would be easier to demonstrate if allvariables were normally distributed. Unfortunately, many reading-related vari-ables are not (e.g., Paris, 2005). Perhaps more important, however, the same chil-dren demonstrated different patterns of this variable in relation to reading in Chi-nese and English, underscoring the importance of the phoneme for English but notfor Chinese. The distributions of the other phonological awareness tasks appearedto be relatively normal. For example, only 19% of the sample had a perfect scoreon the syllable awareness task. Considering the fact that syllable awareness tendsto develop quite early in children (e.g., Treiman & Zukowski, 1991), this distribu-tion seems reasonable. A second limitation of this study was the fact that we hadonly correlational measures of phonological awareness tasks at Time 2. Althoughwe tested reading and nonverbal IQ at Time 1, the full battery of phonologicalawareness measures could only be administered at Time 2. The distribution of thesyllable onset awareness task should be some indication as to why earlier measure-ment of this task seemed impossible. Nevertheless, future studies should focus onmeasuring several levels of phonological awareness across ages when it is practi-cal to do so. For example, in retrospect, the tone discrimination awareness and syl-lable awareness tasks could have been administered at Time 1. Given the demon-strated importance of tone awareness for beginning Chinese character recognition,future research should test this in younger children.


Along with these limitations, our study also had one particular strength. That is,the children tested in this study composed a large sample from all over Hong Kong.Participating children represented those from different schools across Hong Kong.Given that throughout Hong Kong, all kindergarten schools develop different cur-riculums, the fact that the children came from many different areas of the city is anadvantage because the effects of teaching on reading and phonological awarenessdevelopment in our study were likely minimized.

Our study has both theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, wehave demonstrated transfer from L1 phonological awareness to L2 reading, ex-tending it to Chinese tone discrimination awareness in relation to English, as M.Wang et al. (2005) had done previously. Our study, with a narrower age range,larger sample size, and focus on tone in Cantonese, has replicated and extendedthese results. Despite this transfer, however, we have also shown the importance ofdifferent phonological units for reading different orthographies. Again, this gen-eral idea is not new (e.g., Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). However, research on Chi-nese expands on this idea in two ways. First, we have shown that larger phonologi-cal units may actually be more important for reading than are smaller phonologicalunits in early Chinese reading acquisition. Second, we have demonstrated the im-portance of tone detection awareness in a strict test, including three separate tasksof phonological awareness. Such results may be important in further refining andconceptualizing psycholinguistic grain size theory (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005),because the fundamental nature of tones as larger versus smaller units is not alto-gether clear, though the significance of tones as psycholinguistic units that are fun-damental units for reading Chinese is apparent. Practically, these results suggestthat Chinese reading instruction in young children should perhaps focus primarilyon syllable and tone levels of phonological awareness and not on phoneme aware-ness. In contrast, with Chinese–English bilinguals struggling to read English, pho-neme awareness should be the primary focus of instruction, particularly as the chil-dren’s reading skills develop.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to the children and caregivers who facilitated this research. This study wassupported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong SpecialAdministrative Region (Project reference 4257/03H) and by a grant from the Natu-ral Science Foundation of China (Project reference 30470574).

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