The Relationship Between Phonological Awareness And Non-word Short Memory In Learners Of Learning Chinese As A Second Language

A great deal of research has been done concerning the relationship between phonological awareness and linguistic ability in the alphabetic writing systems. Less is understood about Chinese phonological awareness development of learners of Chinese as a second language. In this research, 50 learners of Chinese as a foreign language from each of 1 and 2 grades in Chinese department of Beijing Language and Culture University served as subjects. According to their first language background, they were divided into three groups, Western group, Southeast Asian group, and Japanese group.Two parts were included in this research. (1) Phonological awareness test, test of syllable awareness, onset-rime awareness, and phonemic awareness for each subject. (2) The relationship between phonological awareness and verbal short-term memory. The materials of verbal short-memory include rhyme character strings and non-rhyme character strings. And the rhyme character strings include tonal similar strings and tonal different strings.The results of this research indicated that:1. Chinese phonological awareness of the learners of different LI background was affected by the interaction of their LI background and the Chinese proficiency in reading and writing.2. Different LI background can affect developmental model of L2 learners by various way, but it cannot handicap the ability of their L2 phonological processing.3. As the result got from the Chinese native speakers, phonetic redundancy also made a significant role in Chinese phonological processing of L2 learners.4. The phonetic confusability of the rhyme character strings impaired the verbal short-term memory performance of our subjects. The learners just made more errors onrhyme character strings than on non-rhyme character strings, but no significant difference between errors on tone-same strings and tone-different strings, which had been reported in the performance of Chinese native speakers. The container of short-term memory chunk may be responsible for the difference.5. As a whole, phonological awareness was not correlated to verbal shot-term memory. Such is the same for both Chinese learners and adults in native speakers. Because our subjects are all adult learner, it could be the discipline of learning a second language in adulthood.6. That the syllabic awareness was correlated to verbal shot-term memory of subjects could show the memory chunk of the learners of Chinese from a specific angle.