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A longitudinal study of phonological processing skills and reading in bilingual children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2005

ADÈLE LAFRANCE  and
ALEXANDRA GOTTARDO
ADÈLE LAFRANCE
Affiliation:
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto
ALEXANDRA GOTTARDO
Affiliation:
Wilfrid Laurier University
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Abstract

French/English bilingual children (N=40) in French language schools participated in an 8-month longitudinal study of the relation between phonological processing skills and reading in French and English. Participants were administered measures of phonological awareness, working memory, naming speed, and reading in both languages. The results of the concurrent analyses show that phonological awareness skills in both French and English were uniquely predictive of reading performance in both languages after accounting for the influences of cognitive ability, reading ability, working memory, and naming speed. These findings support the hypothesis that phonological awareness is strongly related to beginning word reading skill in an alphabetic orthography. The results of the longitudinal analyses also suggest that orthographic depth influences phonological factors related to reading.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , October 2005 , pp. 559 - 578
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

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