Understanding the role of prosodic sensitivity, working memory and reading comprehension in Chinese-English bilingual children

PURPOSE: Prosodic sensitivity is the ability to distinguish phonetic contrasts that are related to pitch, duration and intensity, such as Chinese lexical tones and English lexical stress. There is empirical evidence showing that working memory is involved in processing of Chinese lexical tone and English lexical stress. However, there have been fewer studies performed to explore the relative contribution of prosodic sensitivity and working memory to reading comprehension in bilingual readers. The present study examined bilingual children’s sensitivity to Chinese lexical tone and English lexical stress and its relationship with working memory and text reading comprehension. METHOD: A group of 91 8-to-10-year-old Chinese-English bilingual children completed measures of Chinese tone sensitivity, English stress sensitivity, segmental phonological awareness, vocabulary, word reading and text reading comprehension in Chinese and English. They also completed three measures of working memory including sentence span, digit span and visual-spatial tasks. RESULTS: Chinese-English bilingual children showed comparable performance in both Chinese lexical tone and English lexical stress. Concurrent analyses revealed that working memory did not account for any unique variance of Chinese and English reading comprehension. In contrast, Chinese tone sensitivity predicted unique variance of Chinese reading comprehension after controlling for nonverbal ability, Chinese vocabulary knowledge, Chinese word reading, and working memory. Similarly, English stress sensitivity was the strongest predictors of English reading comprehension among the other skills, i.e., nonverbal ability, English vocabulary, English word reading and working memory. CONCLUSION: These results suggest that children’s sensitivity to prosodic features of speech, such as Chinese lexical tone and English lexical stress, plays an important role in reading comprehension, especially for Chinese-English biling