Phonological awareness in Mandarin: is there a difference between Cantonese-Mandarin bilinguals and Mandarin monolinguals?

Abstract

Non-tonal language bilinguals have been found to outperform their monolingual peers in a number of phonological awareness tasks measuring segmental awareness. No research has been conducted to investigate tonal language bilinguals' segmental awareness and tone awareness. The present research was designed to fill this gap by studying the phonological awareness in Mandarin of 31 Cantonese-Mandarin preliterate simultaneous bilingual children and 30 Mandarin preliterate monolingual children. The experiment tested the children's tone awareness, initial awareness (i.e. the awareness of the first consonant of a Mandarin CVVC non-word), final awareness (i.e. the awareness of the VVC sound sequence in a Mandarin CVVC non-word), and Mandarin rime awareness (i.e. the awareness of the VC sound sequence in a CVVC Mandarin non-word). It was hypothesized that the Cantonese-Mandarin bilingual children, by virtue of their ability to use two linguistic systems, would show advantages in these four kinds of awareness of Mandarin phonological units. The results of the experiment did not provide unambiguous support for the hypotheses. Analyses of variance revealed that the Cantonese-Mandarin bilingual children were found to have significantly better awareness than the Mandarin monolingual children only in Mandarin tones and Mandarin initials. In awareness of Mandarin finals, the monolingual children displayed a marked advantage over the bilingual children; and no significant difference was observed between the Cantonese-Mandarin bilinguals and the Mandarin monolinguals in awareness of Mandarin rimes. Analyses of variance also revealed that both the Cantonese-Mandarin bilinguals and the Mandarin monolinguals in this study showed significantly better awareness in Mandarin finals than Mandarin tones, initials and rimes; and the monolinguals' awareness of Mandarin rimes was also significantly better than their awareness of Mandarin initials. The results of initial, final and rime awarenesses are explained within an attention-based framework proposed by the present researcher, which presumes that in daily language use, bilinguals and monolinguals learn to pay different amounts of attention to different phonological units depending on the saliency of the unit. It is reasoned that bilinguals pay more attention to individual phonemes (including initials) in order to differentiate the two linguistic systems they encounter, which leads to the superior performance by the bilinguals in the initial awareness measured in the present study. On the other hand, Mandarin monolingual children pay most of their attention to finals, which thus leads to a better awareness of the Mandarin finals by the monolingual subjects in this study.