| Phonological awareness is the single strongest predictor of reading ability in English-speaking children and a strong predictor of reading ability in other languages, even those with nonalphabetic orthographies. Although the primacy of this skill is uncontested, it is still not clear why phonological awareness is such a potent predictor of reading development. My dissertation was designed to explore which components of phonological awareness are related to reading in order to gain insight into how phonological awareness is related to reading. In particular, I focused on three task-specific dimensions of phonological awareness, (i) the level of processing, (ii) the type of phonological information, and (iii) the linguistic-level of analysis (i.e., linguistic grain size), not because I was interested in the tasks per se, but because associated with each of these is an ongoing theoretical debate about the specific nature of the relationship between phonological awareness and reading. I proposed that a cross-cultural developmental approach is uniquely suited to help adjudicate among the competing hypotheses and provide insight into why phonological awareness is related to reading.; Overall, in the current study 140 English- and Mandarin-speaking 4- to 8-year-old children and 94 English- and Mandarin-speaking skilled adult readers were tested on a battery of measures designed to assess phonological and morphological processing and reading ability. In Study 1, phonological awareness measured by syllable and phoneme elision was the single strongest predictor of reading in 69 monolingual English- and 71 monolingual Mandarin-speaking emergent readers. Phoneme-level awareness developed later in Mandarin-speaking children than English-speaking children but was equally related to reading for children first learning to read Chinese, as for younger and older English-speaking children. However, unlike for English readers, phonological sensitivity as measured by a phonological same/different judgment task with accuracy averaged across prime-target pairs (Same, Different, Alliterating, and Rhyming), was a marginally significant predictor of reading ability after measures of higher-order phonological awareness in Mandarin-speaking readers.; In the Study 2, performance on the phonological sensitivity measure and the phonological awareness task was similar for 67 monolingual English- and 27 monolingual Mandarin-speaking fluent adult readers, suggesting similar phonological ability across cultures. However, for Mandarin speakers, phonological sensitivity (RTs averaged across all priming conditions) and phoneme elision predicted unique variance in single-word-reading. For English speakers, phonological working memory and rapid naming measures but not phonological sensitivity or awareness predicted unique variance in single-word-reading.; These results argue against traditional conceptualizations of phonological sensitivity as a monolithic measure incorporating both epilinguistic and metalinguistic phonological skills. Instead, these results suggest that phonological processing skills are present in both English- and Mandarin-speaking emergent child and skilled adult readers but may show different patterns of predicting reading depending on the sound-symbol relations of a language and the level of reading development. |
