Developing phonological awareness: Is there a bilingual advantage?

TLDR

Three studies examined phonological awareness development in monolingual and bilingual children from kindergarten to Grade 2. The study aimed to extend previous work by comparing two bilingual groups on a range of phonological awareness and reading tasks. Results showed that monolinguals and bilinguals performed similarly on complex phoneme substitution, that literacy instruction language mattered, that Spanish–English bilinguals outperformed monolinguals on phoneme segmentation while Chinese–English bilinguals lagged, and that other phonological measures were comparable, indicating only a limited bilingual advantage.

Abstract

Three studies are reported that examine the development of phonological awareness in monolingual and bilingual children between kindergarten and Grade 2. In the first study, monolingual and bilingual children performed equally well on a complex task requiring phoneme substitution. The second study replicated these results and demonstrated a significant role for the language of literacy instruction. The third study extended the research by including two groups of bilingual children and a range of phonological awareness and reading tasks. Spanish–English bilinguals performed better than English-speaking monolinguals on a phoneme segmentation task, but Chinese–English bilinguals performed worse. Other measures of phonological awareness did not differ among the three groups. The results are discussed in terms of a limit on the effect that bilingualism exerts on metalinguistic development.