Bilingual Phonological Awareness: Reexamining the Evidence for Relations Within and Across Languages

There is increasing interest in the role of phonological awareness across languages. Research is uncovering cross-language effects of phonological awareness upon English reading, even from nonalphabetic languages. However, little of this research has focused on examining the extent to which multiple...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of educational psychology 2015-02, Vol.107 (1), p.111-125
Main Authors: Branum-Martin, Lee, Tao, Sha, Garnaat, Sarah
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bilingual education
Bilingualism
Confirmatory Factor Analysis
Correlation analysis
English
Error of Measurement
Factor Analysis
Greek
Human
Korean
Language
Linguistics
Literature Reviews
Mandarin Chinese
Measurement errors
Meta Analysis
Phonetics
Phonological Awareness
Phonology
Sino Tibetan Languages
Spanish
Structural Equation Modeling
Structural Equation Models
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Summary:There is increasing interest in the role of phonological awareness across languages. Research is uncovering cross-language effects of phonological awareness upon English reading, even from nonalphabetic languages. However, little of this research has focused on examining the extent to which multiple measures of phonological awareness indicate a single construct within or across languages. This article updates 2 recent reviews of the literature by fitting rival a priori models of multiple measures in order to test within-language and across-language structure among multiple phonological awareness tasks. Although the number and types of languages covered were quite limited, the results demonstrate high cross-language correlations, suggesting that measurement error has attenuated prior estimates of the cross-language correlation of phonological tasks. The current results suggest that in alphabetic languages, there is empirical support for phonological awareness as a unitary ability within English and other languages. In Korean and in Spanish, phonological awareness may operate as a language-general construct. In Cantonese and Mandarin, the results were less clear. The results also highlight the limitations of the current research base and important areas for future investigation.
ISSN:0022-0663
1939-2176
DOI:10.1037/a0037149