The Effects Of Dialect Experience On Chinese Children’s Word Awareness

The effects of dialect experience on Chinese children’s word awareness were investigated by comparing90Mandarin-speaking monolinguals and Fuzhou dialect-speaking bilingual children who were from kindergartens and primary school of first, second and third grades. Two insights of word awareness were investigated, that is awareness of arbitrary nature of word and that of word boundaries. All participants completed a nonverbal IQ test and two word awareness tasks including symbol substitution task and word boundaries judgment task. The scores were analyzed with2-way ANOVAs with IQ as the covariate. The result showed a significant language group effect in preschool with bilinguals outperforming monolinguals in symbol substitution task. However, bilingual children did not show advantage over monolinguals in word boundaries judgment task, in contrast, significant language group difference emerged in Grade3with bilinguals demonstrating inferior performance. Explanations are offered in terms of Bialystok’s language possessing model:analysis of linguistic knowledge and control of linguistic processes, the complexity of the development of concept of Chinese word, as well as the distinct linguistic background of Fuzhou dialect-speaking children to elucidate the developmental pattern of Chinese word awareness in a bilingual population whose home language has no writing system.