The relationships between working memory, language, and phonological processing: Evidence from cross-language transfer in bilinguals

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 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.