Phonology and Literacy in Early Bilinguals

描述(由申请人提供)：对于英语水平有限的拉美裔美国儿童来说，学习英语阅读的困难导致了许多研究，以澄清双语者的基本学习过程，制定适当的评估，并预防或改善双语者的沟通障碍或阅读障碍。虽然人们普遍猜测，语音意识训练(尤其是西班牙语)可能有助于双语儿童的阅读，但还没有对训练方案进行实验比较。建议的项目将提供一个关于英语或西班牙语语音意识/语音训练效果的随机分配实验。此外，关于基本语音知识和技能在学习阅读中的作用，还有很多东西需要学习，对于双语儿童来说尤其如此。已发表的关于语音在学习阅读中的作用的研究并没有直接涉及基本的语音知识，而是评估了一组语音意识的元音学任务的表现，这些任务假定存在基本的语音产生和感知能力。到目前为止，缺乏对基本语音能力与语音意识和阅读之间关系的直接研究，这是一个显着的差距。对于早期的二语学习者来说，这一差距尤其重要，因为这些儿童显然必须建立一个新的二语语音系统，包括音素元素及其音素变体，以进行口头交流。通过这种方式，它们为获得二语的语音意识和语音提供了基础。但在双语儿童如何学习阅读的研究背景下，这一基本的语音基础从未被研究过。该项目将通过直接研究基本的语音产生能力，向儿童呈现困难的两种语言的产生任务，并通过精细转录和声学分析在音素细节水平上评估语音相似性和标记来解决双语儿童语音意识的基础问题。在短期纵向努力(K-2年级)的背景下，双语儿童的语音意识和阅读将与语音产生和感知的基本语音技能相关。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Difficulties in learning to read in English for Hispanic-American children with limited English proficiency have led to much research to clarify basic learning processes in bilinguals, to develop appropriate assessments, and to prevent or ameliorate communication disorders or reading disabilities in bilinguals. While there is widespread speculation that training in phonological awareness (especially in Spanish) could be helpful for the bilingual child in reading, there has been no experimental comparison of training options. The proposed project would provide a random assignment experiment on effects of phonological awareness/phonics training in English or Spanish. Further, there is much that remains to be learned about the role of basic phonological knowledge and skills in learning to read, and this is especially true in the case of bilingual children. Published efforts on the role of phonology in learning to read have not addressed basic phonological knowledge directly, but rather have assessed performance on a set of metaphonological tasks of phonological awareness, tasks that presume the existence of basic phonological capabilities of production and perception. The lack of direct research to date on the relationship between basic phonological capabilities and both phonological awareness and reading represents a remarkable gap. The gap is of particular significance in the case of early L2 learners, because such children clearly have to establish a new L2 phonological system of phonemic elements and allophonic variations of them for oral communication. In this way they provide a foundation for acquiring phonological awareness and phonics for L2. But this basic phonological foundation has never been studied in the context of research on how bilingual children learn to read. The proposed project will address the foundations of phonological awareness in bilingual children by studying basic phonological production capability directly, presenting children with difficult production tasks in both languages and assessing production in terms of phonological similarity and markedness at the level of allophonic detail both with fine transcription and acoustic analysis. Basic phonological skills in production and perception will be related to phonological awareness and reading in bilingual children in the context of a short-term longitudinal effort (K-2nd grade).