The relationships between working memory, language, and phonological processing: evidence from cross-language transfer in bilinguals
Year: 2006
Type: dissertation
Study design: Clinical Trial
Abstract: The primary purpose of this study was to bridge the phonological awareness \nresearch conducted with monolingual and bilingual children and to extend the research on \nphonological awareness development in bilinguals in order to evaluate whether specific \nlanguage knowledge or working memory processes provide the underlying support for \nphonological awareness development. The current study was designed to evaluate these \ntwo models by examining sequential bilingual kindergartners’ phonological awareness in \ntheir first language (L1), Spanish, and their second language (L2), English, before and \nafter receiving two sessions of phonological awareness instruction in Spanish. The \nsecondary goal was to investigate whether phonological instruction presented in Spanish \nwould directly lead to increased skills in English. Results indicated that children made \nsignificant and equivalent phonological awareness gains in Spanish and English \nviii \nfollowing training provided in Spanish. These results appear to provide some \ncontradictory support for the language-based model of phonological awareness that has \nbeen presented, according to which a significant difference between phonological \nawareness in children’s stronger L1 and weaker L2 would have been expected. \nChildren’s working memory skills, as measured by nonword repetition and an \nexperimental complex span task in Spanish, predicted their phonological awareness gains \nin both languages. Performance on the complex span task was a strong predictor of \nSpanish gains and a moderate predictor of English gains, while performance on the \nnonword repetition task was a moderate predictor of gains in both Spanish and English. \nThese results appear to support the memory-based model, which maintains that working \nmemory processes underlie phonological awareness due to their role in coding stable \nphonological representations
Author: Brenda K. Gorman
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2345927677