The relationships between working memory, language, and phonological processing: evidence from cross-language transfer in bilinguals
Abstract
The primary purpose of this study was to bridge the phonological awareness
research conducted with monolingual and bilingual children and to extend the research on
phonological awareness development in bilinguals in order to evaluate whether specific
language knowledge or working memory processes provide the underlying support for
phonological awareness development. The current study was designed to evaluate these
two models by examining sequential bilingual kindergartners’ phonological awareness in
their first language (L1), Spanish, and their second language (L2), English, before and
after receiving two sessions of phonological awareness instruction in Spanish. The
secondary goal was to investigate whether phonological instruction presented in Spanish
would directly lead to increased skills in English. Results indicated that children made
significant and equivalent phonological awareness gains in Spanish and English
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following training provided in Spanish. These results appear to provide some
contradictory support for the language-based model of phonological awareness that has
been presented, according to which a significant difference between phonological
awareness in children’s stronger L1 and weaker L2 would have been expected.
Children’s working memory skills, as measured by nonword repetition and an
experimental complex span task in Spanish, predicted their phonological awareness gains
in both languages. Performance on the complex span task was a strong predictor of
Spanish gains and a moderate predictor of English gains, while performance on the
nonword repetition task was a moderate predictor of gains in both Spanish and English.
These results appear to support the memory-based model, which maintains that working
memory processes underlie phonological awareness due to their role in coding stable
phonological representations
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