Phonological Processing Skills and Early Reading Abilities in Hong Kong Chinese Kindergarteners Learning to Read English as a Second Language.

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Abstract
The present 9-month longitudinal study investigated relations between Chinese native language phono- logical processing skills and early Chinese and English reading abilities among 227 kindergarteners in Hong Kong. Phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and short-term verbal memory differed in their relations to concurrent and subsequent Chinese and English word recognition. The significant bidirectional relations between phonological awareness and Chinese reading ability remained even after accounting for the variance due to age, vocabulary, and visual skills performance. When all predictors were considered simultaneously, only phonological awareness remained a significant predictor of Chinese and English reading abilities both concurrently and longitudinally. The present study focused on two research questions related to early reading abilities among Hong Kong beginning readers. First, how do Chinese native language phonological processing skills predict reading acquisition in both Chinese and English as a second language in young children? Second, to what extent are these native language phonological processing skills bidirection- ally associated with reading in Chinese and English as a second language? Our study design emerged primarily as a result of two others, one focused on phonological processing skills and Chinese character recognition in Chinese kindergarteners (McBride-Chang & Ho, 2000a) and one on transfer of phonological processing skills from Chinese to English word recognition in older children (Got- tardo, Yan, Siegel, & Wade-Woolley, 2001).