THE ROLE OF VISUAL PROCESSING AND PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS IN ENGLISH WORD READING AMONG MANDARIN-ENGLISH AND MALAY-ENGLISH SIMULTANEOUS BILINGUALS

Abstract

Bilinguals with different language backgrounds develop their second language reading skills using different processing (Muljani, et. al., 1998), due to the transparency of the orthography-phonology mappings of their first language (Franceshini, et al., 2012). This study investigated the extent to which contrasting linguistic structures of Singaporean simultaneous bilinguals’ home languages influence lexical and non-lexical processing of English words and nonwords. Mandarin-English (n=30) and Malay-English (n=30) bilinguals (aged 6.17 to 8.92 years) were matched pairwise for age, nonverbal intelligence, and English receptive vocabulary. Performance on phonological awareness (PA), visual processing (VP), single-word and pseudoword reading was assessed in a 6-month longitudinal design. Results showed that the Mandarin-English children had significantly better VP whilst the Malay-English children had significantly better PA. There were no significant group differences in overall reading performance. PA at T1, but not VP, predicted reading accuracy at Time 2 for both bilingual groups for real words and pseudowords.