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Introduction
Phoneme awareness is the ability to
manipulate consonants and vowels mentally. It is fundamental in the development of English
reading competency because the English alphabet represents phonemes. Measure-ment of this
capacity has enabled researchers to successfully predict early reading achievement.
For instance, V. A. Mann (1993) found that in kindergarten, awareness of the initial
phonemes in spoken words predicts reading competency in the first grade.
Metalinguistic awareness of phonemes and syllables has been a stable predictor of reading
performance across numerous longitudinal studies (McBride-Chang 1995).
In the present study, we explored phoneme awareness in a Spanish-English bilingual
population. The aim of our study was threefold: 1) to confirm previous findings of
relatedness between reading ability and phoneme awareness, 2) to evaluate monolingual
versus bilingual performance, and 3) to examine if phoneme awareness transfers between
languages.
H. A. Yopp (1988) found that a combination of two testsone testing Compound Phonemic
Awareness, and the other testing Simple Phonemic Awarenesswould be most predictive of
reading acquisition. Compound Phonemic Awareness tasks require that phonemes be held
in memory while performing secondary operations. This study also examines two Simple
Phonemic Awareness tasks that involve the manipulation of individual phonemes. One
is the Yopp-Singer Phoneme Segmentation Task (PST). In Yopp's study, this test was
the purest measure of Simple Phonemic Awareness. The other measure is the Mann
Phoneme Segmentation Test (PST) (Mann 1993). A benefit of this task, as opposed to
the Yopp-Singer task, is that it requires little formal instruction, and children do not
need to access "school skills" such as their knowledge of letter sounds like
"buh" and "ess." The recognition that stimuli such as
"cat" consists of "cuh" "ah" "tuh" is critical to
performance on the Yopp-Singer task, which makes that task more dependent on educational
exposure. The Mann test only requires children to decode which words start with the
same sound.
Phonological tasks like those employed by Yopp and Mann have been used primarily with
monolingual speakers of English. Many Spanish-speaking children do not succeed in
learning to read well; deficient phonological awareness could be a factor. This is
confirmed by J. E. Jimenez's (1997) study comparing Spanish-speaking normal and
reading-disabled children that found differences in the phonological awareness of the |
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two groups.
The reading-disabled group performed poorer overall on the phoneme segmentation
tests. The present concern is with Spanish- or English-speaking monolingual and
bilingual subjects and how they perform on such tasks. Thus, we adopted the
Yopp-Singer and Mann tests into Spanish for the present study.
Considering the impact of bilingualism on phonological awareness, Walley (Bruck and
Genesee 1995) suggested that bilinguals, in order to differentiate between their two
languages, must routinely pay closer attention to speech and therefore, must be advantaged
over monolinguals in their heightened sensitivity to individual phonemes.
Furthermore, it has been asserted that instruction gives bilingual children an advantage
over monolingual children in tasks in which children are to analyze the structural aspects
of language.
M. Bruck and F. Genesee (1995), however, question Walley's assertion that bilingualism
improves phonological awareness in general. Instead, Bruck and Genesee (1995) have
asserted, instead, that monolinguals can outperform bilinguals in phoneme awareness tasks,
especially when the effect of instruction is taken into account. They suggest that
phonological awareness in monolinguals learning to read English would be more influenced
by literacy instruction than in bilinguals learning to read French. They based this
on reading acquisition models that indicate greater ease in distinguishing and identifying
phonemes if orthographic representations of the alphabet are stored in memory. For
instance, the three co-articulated phonemes, /s/-/u/-/n/, are more easily recognized as
such, once subjects understand that "sun" is spelled with three letters (Bruck
and Genesee 1995). Bruck and Genesee expected that monolingual subjects will have
more practice with individual orthographic patterns and the words they transcribe, and
therefore will develop stronger grapheme-phoneme associations than their bilingual
counterparts.
Unlike Bruck and Genesee (1995), A. Y. Durgunoglu, W. E. Nagy, and B. J. Hancin-Bhatt
(1993) did not look for, find, or compare specific phonological awareness skills among
bilinguals versus monolinguals. Instead, they found a general transfer of phonological
awareness in one direction, from Spanish to English. Their study included first grade
students who were taught in Spanish. They were administered tests of letter naming,
Spanish phonological awareness, Spanish and English word recognition, and Spanish and
English oral proficiency. Levels of Spanish word recognition and phonological
awareness predicted subjects' scores on English word and pseudoword recognition tests.
 
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