The effects of early-English education on phonological awareness skills in relation to vocabulary development

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2017-08-22
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en
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Prior studies on the effect of bilingualism and immersion education on phonological awareness skills have found three intriguing effects when it comes to phonological awareness development. Firstly, bilingual children have been found to have a smaller vocabulary size than monolingual children. Secondly, a smaller vocabulary size has been found to lead to worse phonological awareness skills. Thirdly, bilingual children outperformed their monolingual peers on their phonological awareness skills. In accordance with the first two effects, bilingual children would, however, be expected to be worse at phonological awareness. This evokes an intriguing contradiction. The aim of the present study was to investigate this contradictory pattern in children in early-English education instead of bilingual children and to investigate whether this contradiction could be related to combined vocabulary size instead of the separate vocabulary sizes, as previous studies only concerned separate vocabulary sizes. To reach both aims, the question that was addressed in the present study was to what extent vocabulary development related to phonological awareness development in children in early-English education compared to children in regular education. A total of 151 Dutch-speaking children in grade 1 and 2 were asked to perform two phonological awareness tasks in Dutch, i.e., synthesis and rhyming, as well as a receptive Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. From the current study, the contradiction that became clear from the literature did not appear. It was found that children in early-English education did not differ significantly from children in regular education with respect to their rhyming and synthesis skills. Furthermore, combined Dutch and English vocabulary size explained phonological awareness scores better than separate Dutch or English vocabulary size. This provides evidence that it is indeed important to consider combined vocabulary size instead of separate vocabulary size.
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