Elsevier

Cognitive Development

Volume 30, April–June 2014, Pages 65-80
Cognitive Development

The relationship between phonological awareness and executive attention in Chinese-English bilingual children

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2013.11.003Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Bidirectional relationships exist between phonological awareness (PA) and executive attention, with PA predicting executive attention and vice versa.

  • The predictive relationship of PA to executive attention was more pronounced for both English-onset and Chinese-rime awareness.

  • Orienting attention was strongly related to both English and Chinese PA skills, whereas executive-control attention was associated with English PA only.

  • Evidence for cross-linguistic transfer of PA skills suggests potentially concurrent contributions of bilinguals’ multiple PA skills to cognitive advantages in executive attention.

Abstract

We examined the relationship between phonological awareness (PA) and executive attention among Chinese-English bilingual children in the process of learning to read. Seventy-four bilingual children (mean age 67.5 months) completed phonological tasks assessing onset and rime awareness and the Attention Network Test (ANT), a nonverbal measure of executive attention (Rueda et al., 2004). Hierarchical analyses revealed bidirectional relations between PA and executive attention, with PA predicting executive attention and vice versa. The predictive relation of PA to executive attention was more pronounced for English onset and Chinese rime awareness. Evidence of cross-linguistic transfer of PA skills suggests concurrent contributions of bilinguals’ multiple PA skills to cognitive advantages in executive attention. Further analysis revealed that orienting attention was strongly related to both English and Chinese PA skills, whereas executive control attention was associated with English PA only. These results offer new insight into the phonological skills relevant to aspects of attentional control in bilingual children.

Introduction

One of the primary features differentiating the linguistic development of bilinguals from that of monolinguals is constant practice distinguishing between two languages in the speech stream (Gottardo, 2002, Walley, 1993). Hearing and speaking two languages may facilitate understanding of the arbitrariness of language and encourage grasp of the phonological features of these languages, especially before formal literacy instruction has begun. Compared to monolingual children, bilingual children have greater phonological awareness1 (PA), or sensitivity to the phonological structure of words in their language (Anthony and Francis, 2005, Torgesen et al., 1994). French-English bilingual infants as young as 10–12 months hear phonemic contrasts in both languages, which suggests that bilingual infants acquire separate phonological systems (Burns, Yoshida, Hill, & Werker, 2007). Compared to their monolingual peers, bilingual kindergarteners have also shown greater facility for phonological tasks, including onset and rime discrimination in French-English (Bruck & Genesse, 1995), rhyme-oddity detection in Urdo-English (Mumtaz & Humphreys, 2001), initial-syllable deletion in Italian-English (Campbell & Sais, 1995), phonemic segmentation in French-English (Rubin & Turner, 1989), word awareness in Italian-English (Yelland, Pollard, & Mercuri, 1993), and phoneme segmentation in Spanish-English (Bialystok, Majumder, & Martin, 2003).

These findings provide evidence for bilingual advantages in PA and suggest that bilingual children approach problems assessing phonological awareness differently from their monolingual peers. However, bilingual advantages in PA are constrained by several conditions. Bilingual superiority in PA seems apparent in early childhood but disappears when formal literacy instruction begins in the first grade (Bruck and Genesse, 1995, Yelland et al., 1993). Bilingual advantages are also limited to either relatively primitive levels of PA, which do not include high-level cognitive computations, or to bilingual children whose spoken language pairs are in some manner related (Bialystok, 2001). Nevertheless, it is at least clear that bilingual children possess a greater repertoire of phoneme distinctions than do monolingual peers.

It is difficult for children to spontaneously extract or attend to phonological segments of speech because they often automatically attend to the meaning of a spoken message rather than to individual phonemes perceived as elusive or abstract (Lundberg, Larsman, & Strid, 2012). This may explain why most achieve minimal levels of phonological awareness prior to literacy instruction (Anthony & Francis, 2005). Given that PA skills are based on the ability to analyze an individual phoneme (i.e., a sound) in the context of the surrounding sounds in the word, superior PA skills may enhance attention abilities. The reverse is also possible. Greater attention-control abilities—which can be employed to focus attention flexibly and strategically on the phonological structure of words—may promote PA skills. A bidirectional relation likely exists between bilingual children's superior PA skills and their attention-control abilities, but little is known about this link. We therefore sought to investigate the relation between bilinguals’ PA skills and executive attention, defined as the ability to regulate attention in the face of distraction during information processing (Posner and Rothbart, 2007, Yang et al., 2011).

Previous research suggests a potential link between bilingual PA and executive attention. First, bilingual advantages in PA skills are pronounced, especially in early childhood; bilingual executive attention is also superior at this stage (Yang et al., 2011). Given that bilingual experiences are associated with development of both PA and executive attention, it is plausible that aspects of executive attention processes (assumed to be at the core of a wide range of cognitive abilities) may overlap with or relate, at least in part, to some of the primary processes underlying PA skills.

Second, there is substantial evidence that PA skill is a precursor to reading-related abilities. Increase in PA relates to letter-sound learning (De Jong, 2007), character recognition (Shu, Peng, & McBride-Chang, 2008), and word-level reading (Wagner et al., 1997). Given these literacy abilities are associated partly with attentional processes (Commodari and Guarnera, 2005, Franceschini et al., 2012), superior PA skills are likely also linked to attentional processes. Several studies have in fact documented associations between PA skills and attentional processing. Lundberg et al. (1988) have demonstrated that preschool children trained to attend to the phonological structure of language showed improvement across different levels of PA tasks, including rime detection, syllable manipulation, and phoneme segmentation. Similarly, Campbell and Sais (1995) maintain that the bilingual advantage in PA occurs because bilingual children develop enhanced control of phonological structures in order to use the appropriate phonological repertoire in each language.

Third, bilinguals’ advantage in PA is pronounced in early childhood but disappears in first grade (Bruck and Genesse, 1995, Yelland et al., 1993). Thus literacy instruction greatly reduces any difference in PA skills between bilinguals and monolinguals. Yet the contribution of literacy training to phonological skills may be more pronounced in monolinguals than bilinguals. Bilinguals’ early need for and practice with PA skills may serve as cognitive scaffolding to foster higher-order controlled processing.

Finally, a number of studies have reported cross-linguistic transfer of PA skills not only in bilinguals who speak similar languages, such as English and Spanish (Lindsey, Manis, & Bailey, 2003) or English and French (Comeau, Cormier, Grandmaison, & Lacroix, 1999), but also in those who speak typologically dissimilar languages characterized by different phonological and writing systems and grammatical structures, such as English and Korean (Kang, 2012) and English and Chinese (Luk & Bialystok, 2008). Cross-language transfer of these bilinguals’ PA skills would lead to increased understanding of individual phonemes and competence in phonological analysis, since differences between the two languages may make phonological distinctions more salient. The cognitive processes employed to assess such differences and resolve potential conflicts may positively impact adaptive cognitive functioning.

PA skills develop in a similar pattern across languages, advancing from larger units of sound (e.g., words and syllables) to smaller units of sound like onsets, syllable rimes, and phonemes (Lonigan, Burgess, & Anthony, 2000). In general, PA skills that involve the detection of similar or dissimilar sounds (as in oddity tasks) are mastered before those that require manipulation of sounds (as in deletion tasks), and blending skills are mastered before segmenting skills (Anthony, Lonigan, Driscoll, Phillips, & Burgess, 2003). The literature also suggests, however, that systematic language-related differences may play a key role in the development of PA (McBride-Chang, Bialystok, Chong, & Li, 2004). For instance, English is an alphabetic language, in which individual letters map onto individual phonemes, while Chinese is a logographic language in which characters correspond to syllabic morphemes rather than phonemes (Wang, Perfetti, & Liu, 2005). Thus, English and Chinese contrast in both their writing systems and their spoken forms (Wang et al., 2005).

Specifically, English and Chinese differ in the complexity of their syllabic structures (Chen, 2006). A syllable is divided into the onset—which refers to the initial consonant or consonant cluster present in syllables—and the rime—which refers to the remaining vowel and consonants (e.g., -at in cat). The onset can be further divided into either singleton onset (i.e., an initial consonant, e.g., t- in top) or cluster onset (i.e., more than one consonant, e.g., st- in stop). English words allow for highly complex syllable structures that include both singleton and cluster onsets, whereas Chinese words contain virtually no cluster onsets (Hansen, 2001). This critical contrast in syllablic structure can require different phonological processing for English and Chinese speech sounds (Chen, 2006); that is, sensitivity to subsyllabic structure (i.e., onset vs. rime) is not as critical to learning Chinese as it is to learning English. Chinese-English bilingual children may therefore develop specific cognitive strategies for efficient phonological processing of English vs. Chinese speech sounds, which may in turn result in language-specific associations with attention abilities.

Because children attain minimal levels of phonological awareness prior to literacy instruction (Anthony & Francis, 2005), we took caution to select developmentally appropriate tasks for our preliterate participants (mean age 5 years 6 months). Tasks were chosen to (a) assess detection of sounds rather than manipulation or blending of sounds, as the latter is difficult for preliterate children, and (b) focus on smaller, intrasyllabic (onset or rime) units rather than syllable units since the ability to detect those is attained earlier and was thus deemed too easy (Anthony & Francis, 2005). We used PA tasks that require oddity detection in onset (e.g., b- in beak and sp- in spin) and rime (e.g., -eak in beak and -in in spin), because onset-rime division abilities emerge prior to exposure to reading, while phonemic awareness develops as a consequence of reading (Bradley and Bryant, 1983, Goswami, 1991).

Scant attention has been paid to a potential link between PA and higher-order cognitive processes that may constitute executive attention functioning. Farrar, Ashwell, and Maag (2005) argue that PA taps cognitive flexibility, which they define as ability to handle different representations of the same situation. PA requires considering the sounds of words while ignoring their meanings. Farrar and Ashwell (2012) have demonstrated a significant relationship between the rhyming abilities of 4-year-olds and theory of mind, which requires the ability to understand conflicting representations. Blair and Razza (2007) report that children's emerging literacy abilities are related to the inhibitory-control aspect of executive function. Lastly, Leather and Henry (1994) have found a significant relation between phonological tasks and complex working memory tasks, often referred to as the “controlled-attention framework” (Engle, Tuholski, Laughlin, & Conway, 1999). It is thus plausible that bilinguals’ enhanced phonological skills are associated with superior executive attention (i.e., the attentional aspect of executive function).

To test executive attention, we employed the Attention Network Test (ANT), a nonverbal measure of executive function. The ANT is consistent with other behavioral measures often used to assess executive function, such as the Stroop Test or the Dimensional Change Card Sort Task (Yang & Lust, 2005). The measure is based on the theory that executive attention is a multidimensional regulatory construct found in three anatomical regions of the brain that correspond to three types of attentional functions (Fan, McCandliss, Sommer, Raz, & Posner, 2002): (a) the alerting network, related to maintaining readiness; (b) the orienting network, responsible for selectively allocating attention to stimuli for further processing; and (c) the executive control network, which specializes in control processes such as conflict resolution. The ANT measures efficiency of these three attentional functions (Callejas, Lupiáñez, & Tudela, 2004).

Previous research suggests that factors like age, gender, and family income, or linguistic variables like receptive vocabulary, may affect PA skills or performance on the ANT. Lundberg et al. (2012) observed clear effects of sex and socioeconomic status (SES) in their study, which tested the PA skills of more than 2000 six-year-olds during the preschool year. They found that girls demonstrated higher PA skills than boys and children in less favorable SES environments had lower PA skills. Some research also reveals a potential impact of SES on bilingual advantages in executive processes, although this is still controversial (Morton & Harper, 2007). Receptive vocabulary also appears positively related to PA (Anthony et al., 1997, McBride-Chang et al., 1997). Given these findings, age, sex, SES, and receptive vocabulary should be controlled to assess the relationship between PA skill and executive attention.

We investigate the predictive relationship of PA to executive attention among bilingual children with emerging reading abilities, in part to shed light on the linguistic factors that underlie the bilingual advantage in executive processes. Given the bidirectional nature of this relationship, we also examine whether individual differences in executive attention predict PA skills. We recruited Chinese-English bilingual children, as these languages contrast sharply in both their mapping principles and orthographic forms (Wang et al., 2005); the linguistic differences allowed us to examine the concurrent and unique contribution of language-specific PA skills to the development of executive attention, and vice versa.

Our main hypothesis was that phonological skills would significantly predict overall performance on the ANT, and vice versa, when variables such as age, gender, family income, and receptive vocabulary were controlled. Regarding three specific attentional networks (alerting, orienting, and executive control), we expected that high PA scores would be associated with greater orienting effects, because greater PA skills are assumed to rely on the ability to selectively allocate attention to specific sounds in words. We also expected that greater PA skills, which may stem from practice ignoring conflicting or irrelevant information during analysis of individual phonemes, would be associated with greater executive control. We did not, however, expect any specific relationship between PA skills and alerting effects. Since alertness, or a state of readiness, is known to develop in infancy—much earlier than other attentional functions (Fan et al., 2002, Rueda et al., 2004)—we expected that bilingual participants would have already attained somewhat advanced levels of alertness and would thus be less susceptible to the impact of alerting. We do not endorse any one of these hypotheses in relation to either English PA or Chinese PA; rather, we seek to identify how one or more of these hypothetical relations are revealed in the context of language-specific PA skills. Moreover, because we employed regression analyses to explore the predictive (and bidirectional) relation between PA skills and executive attention, our goal was not to infer any causal relation between the constructs.

Section snippets

Participants

Seventy-four Chinese-English children were recruited through local childcare centers in Singapore (36 female; mean age 67.5 months, SD = 3.9). English was the main language used during instruction, but Chinese-speaking assistant teachers facilitated daily Chinese lessons and activities. All children were enrolled in kindergarten (K1) and participated in both English and Chinese literacy activities such as storytelling or vocabulary-development exercises (Table 1).

Parents completed a short

Descriptive statistics

Means and SDs for all assessments are presented in Table 2. A paired t-test showed that vocabulary scores on the PPVT were higher in English than in Chinese, t(73) = 5.75, p < .001. Multiple one-sample t-tests were conducted to compare each PA score to chance level (50%). Participants performed significantly above chance level for all the PA skills, all ps < .05, except for Chinese onset awareness, t(73) = −1.56, p = .12. Paired t-tests were conducted for within-language comparisons. No difference was

Discussion

Our study demonstrates that bilinguals’ phonological skills are bidirectionally related to overall executive attentional functioning, as assessed by the ANT. The predictive relationship varies by level of PA skill (onset vs. rime) and by language (English vs. Chinese). Evidence of cross-language phonological transfer suggests that bilinguals’ multiple phonological skills depend on each other, and thus may concurrently relate to cognitive advantages in executive attention.

Orienting abilities

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a research grant awarded to H. Yang (10-C2420-SMU-011). We thank Dr. Giho Park for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Many thanks also go to the directors of the daycare centers and the parents and children who participated in the study.

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