The Influence Of Dialect Experience Upon The Formation And Development Of Children's Phonological Awareness

1. IntroductionPhonological awareness can be defined as the ability to reflect on and manipulate the phonemic segments of speech. Elsewhere, some researchers ( Tunmer, in press-a, in press-b, Tunmer & Herriman, 1984; Tunmer, Herriman & Nesdale, 1988) have suggested that phonological awareness is one of four general types of metalinguistic ability, which may be described as a developmentally distinct kind of linguistic functioning that develops separately from, and later than, basic speaking and listening skills. This general view of phonological awareness is shared by others. Shankweiler and Crain (1986), for example, argue that "explicit conscious awareness of phonemic structures depends on metalinguistic abilities that do not come free with the acquisition of language" (p. 142). Consistent with this claim is the observation that many 4- and 5-year-old children who appear to possess normal language comprehension and speaking skills are unable to perform such seemingly simple metalinguistic operations as counting the number of phonemes in spoken works or identifying words that do not rhyme with other words.Many factors contribute to the development of phonological awareness. In China, especially in the southern provinces as Guangdong and Fujian, many children grow up with dialect experience. Dialect can be regarded as a variety of standard Chinese Putonghua. Dialects always have their own pronunciation rules. We want to test whether the speech experience-dialect- can affect Chinese children's phonological awareness. Do children with dialect experience have more advantages than those with no dialect experience or vice versa?2. Research PurposeThis study attempts to study how dialects influence the formation and the development of Chinese children's phonological awareness. If it does, what aspects of phonological awareness are most saliently impacted.3. Research MethodsOurs was a developmental study. We took a cross-sectional method to test the phonological awareness of three grades, grade two, grade four and grade six so that we could examine the formation and development of phonological awareness throughout the years.4. Experiments Design:We carried four experiments to study subjects' syllable awareness, onset-rime awareness and tone awareness. In Chinese phonological awareness, they are syllable awareness, syllable-initial consonant(声母) awareness, syllable-final vowel and consonant(韵母) awareness, and tone(声调) awareness. We made a 3x2 between-subject design, i.e Grades (Grade 2, 4 and 6) x Speech Experience (putonghua, and putonghua plus dialect)Subjects:According to the speech experience before primary school, the subjects are classified as: 1) children who can speak only Putonghua, 2) children who can speak both Putonghua and Fuzhou dialect. The 240 subjects are all from the Affiliated Primary School of Fujian Normal University. We chose 80 students from three grades, Grade two, Grade four and Grade six, including 40 boys and 40 girls in each grade.Experiments Programs:The experiment was performed on a professional Response Recording Program, which was able to record subjects' response time and correct rate in the experiments. All the items were shown on the computer screen. All the subjects were asked to give a response to the items with the mouse of computer. The left key means correct and the right key means wrong.5. Results:5.1. Syllable awarenessAll the subjects' response time and correct percentage were dealt with by SPSS 8.0 for Windows. We have done subject analysis and item analysis. From the result of MANOVA of the General Linear Model, we can see that speech experience's effect has not reached significant level, whereas students' grades factor has reached very significant level. (P<0.005)5.2. Syllable-initial consonant awarenessFrom the MANOVA's result of subject analysis, we can see that speech experience factor has significant effect on syllable-initial consonant awareness (P<0.05), while grade factor has very significant effect (P<0.005). The speech and...