Phonological Attunement And The Problem Of The Measurement Of Phonological Awareness In Bilingual Children

Whether bilinguals have advantages or not in phonological awareness is in the heat of the debate.Current study suggests that the basis of the debate is problematic because the results of traditional measurements of phonological awareness are strongly affected by the testing materials instead of being affected by phonological awareness itself;therefore the common paradigm of phonological awareness tests cannot objectively reflect bilinguals’phonological awareness.Our theoretical basis is Best’s Perceptual Assimilation Model(1995)and Flege’s Speech Learning Model(1987,1995,1999,2002).According to them,phonological attunement occurs to bilinguals at the first few years of learning a second language,and it will at least temporarily interfere with bilinguals’phonological perception and production because of the assimilation of the phonological categories of L1 and L2.During the so-called attunement period,bilinguals are affected by the relatively more complicated phonological representation and get lower scores in phonological awareness tests.But their real ability to manipulate sounds is not manifested from the tests.Through the experimental paradigm of cross-modalities phonological interference,the current study is devoted to examining the influence of experimental materials upon bilingual children’s performance in phonological awareness tests.Fifty-eight third graders were asked to fast name Mandarin characters under auditory interfering conditions,which included highly-confusing pronunciation,lowly-confusing pronunciation and control pronunciation conditions.As the experimental results turned out,bilingual children were more easy to be interfered by the experimental materials than monolingual children:they responded slower and were scored lower than their monolingual peers under highly-confusing interfering condition,but they performed with no significant difference in response time under lowly-confusing and control interfering conditions.Moreover the the degree of the phonological similarity is one of the important elements affecting bilingual’s performance in phonological tests of L2.Comparing their performance among new L2 phonemes,bilingual participants performed worse when the new L2 phonemes were similar with those of L1,but performed relatively better when the new L2 phonemes were completely different from those of L1.Furthermore,the position of confusing phoneme is also an important factor of the results of L2 phonological awareness tests.In the present study we found that bilingual children dealt better with the confusing phonemes appearing in consonant position,but performed worse when the confusing phonemes appeared in vowel position.All in all,the common paradigm of phonological awareness test is not suitable for bilinguals,and that is why we still can not reach an agreement on bilingual(dis)advantages in phonological awareness.