Language and reading comprehension in bilingual children and adults

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Successful learning relies on extracting meaning from spoken language or written text. While language comprehension is a stepping-stone for reading comprehension, there is less research examining language comprehension as a construct. The Complete View of Reading (CVRi, Francis et al., 2018), extended the Simple View of Reading (SVR, Gough Hoover nd in written text has not been fully explored in bilinguals. Building on the SVR and CVRi, this proposed research program aims to examine the contribution of L2 language comprehension and attentional control to L2 reading comprehension in bilingual children and adults. Three investigative objectives are: (1) to assess language comprehension in L2 and examine its relationship with attentional control in bilingual children, adolescents, and adults; (2) to examine the co-variation of decoding, L2 language comprehension, and L2 reading comprehension in children and adolescents across one year; and (3) to investigate the role of L2 language comprehension and attentional control in contributing to L2 reading comprehension in adults with early (before formal schooling at age 5) or late onset ages of L2 exposure (after elementary education at age 12). Three projects will recruit children (ages 6-9), adolescents (ages 12-15) and young adults (ages 18-40) who speak English as an L2. In Project 1, children, adolescents, and adults will be recruited to provide elicited speech after learning new information from videos in L2 as a proxy of language comprehension via language production. In Project 2, children and adolescents will complete a short version of the video task developed in Project 1, tasks measuring language-general attentional control, working memory, vocabulary in English, lexical retrieval fluency in English, and reading comprehension in English. Children and adolescents will be seen again after six months and one year to establish cross-sectional and longitudinal relationship between language and reading comprehension in L2. In Project 3, adults with early or late exposure to English as L2 will be given tasks similar to those in Project 2 adapted for adults. Collectively, these projects establish the developmental trajectories of comprehending spoken language and written text in bilingual children and adults. The project contributes to a long-term goal of developing and testing a reading model combining language and cognitive skills in a multilingual population from childhood to adulthood.