Phonology and Literacy in Early Bilinguals

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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).