Becoming Biliterate in English and Chinese: What is the Role of Higher Level Phonological Processing?

Xiuli Shelley Tong

English and Chinese are the two most spoken languages in the world. Understanding the key factors involved in learning to read these two languages is important for biliteracy acquisition. This 1-year longitudinal study will examine a factor that is little explored, but potentially very powerful in biliteracy acquisition: suprasegmental phonological processing. Suprasegmental phonological processing is specific to sensitivity to Chinese lexical tone and English lexical stress that operates above the segmental level tasks, such as phoneme segmentation. Comparable measures of Chinese and English suprasegmental phonological processing, segmental phonological processing, verbal and nonverbal cognitive abilities, and word reading will be administered to 150 Chinese-English bilingual children between the ages of 6 and 8. We will conduct structural equation modeling analyses to examine relations between lexical tone and lexical stress processing and the possibility of transfer of suprasegmental phonological processing to word reading across languages in bilingual children. This study will inform us as to how to best support biliteracy acquisition.

About Xiuli Shelley Tong

Xiuli Shelley Tong is assistant professor of the Division of Speech and Hearing Science at the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. She graduated with a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in the fall of 2008. Her research is directed toward understanding cognitive mechanisms that underlie early bilingual acquisition in English and Chinese. Her research addressed two primary issues concerning the nature of early bilingual acquisition. First, how do bilinguals learn and characterize the regularity of two different languages? Second, what are the effects of language distance at the level of sound, meaning, lexicon, and grammar on the developmental trajectories of bilingual language and literacy acquisition? Her current research project is sought to examine these issues by studying bilingual children who are learning English and Chinese simultaneously in both English and Chinese context. This research has important implication to improve educational opportunities of millions of bilingual learners in the U.S. by identifying key factors influencing bilingual children’s language proficiency. This will help bolstering bilingual learner’s long-term academic success and helping them functioning effectively in a bilingual community or society.