JOURNAL ARTICLE

Phonological awareness in young second language learners

Maggie BruckFred Genesee

Year: 1995 Journal:   Journal of Child Language Vol: 22 (2)Pages: 307-324   Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Abstract

ABSTRACT English-speaking children ( N = 91) who were attending French schools (bilingual group) were given a battery of phonological awareness tests in kindergarten and in grade 1. At the time of kindergarten testing the mean age of the children was 5:9. Their performance was compared to age-matched English-speaking children ( N = 72) attending English schools (monolingual group). The bilingual children showed heightened levels of phonological awareness skills in kindergarten in the area of onset-rime awareness. By grade 1, the pattern of group differences was more complex. The monolingual and bilingual children performed similarly on onset-rime segmentation tasks. The monolingual children had higher phoneme awareness scores than their French-schooled peers; this result is interpreted to reflect the role of literacy instruction on phoneme awareness development. In comparison, the bilingual children had higher syllable segmentation scores than their monolingual peers. This result is interpreted to reflect the role of second language input on phonological awareness.

Keywords:
Phonological awareness Psychology Hard rime Syllable Phonology Neuroscience of multilingualism Literacy Metalinguistics Phonological development Linguistics Psycholinguistics Developmental psychology Vocabulary development Teaching method Cognition Mathematics education Pedagogy

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271
Cited By
1.77
FWCI (Field Weighted Citation Impact)
43
Refs
0.85
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Citation History

Topics

Reading and Literacy Development
Social Sciences →  Psychology →  Developmental and Educational Psychology
Language Development and Disorders
Social Sciences →  Psychology →  Developmental and Educational Psychology
Phonetics and Phonology Research
Social Sciences →  Psychology →  Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
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