Preschool-age Children
Sue, Peng and McBride-Chang (2008) investigated the development of PA in 146 Mandarin-speaking children at four age levels in Beijing. These age levels included three preschool levels (ages 3;3-3;11 [K1], 4;0-4;11 [K2], and 5;0-5;11 [K3]) and Grade 1 (age 6;0-7;6). They administered a receptive common unit task with only two
options to measure children’s PA at four linguistic levels: syllable, rime, onset and tone. It was found that syllable and rime PA develop early from K1 to K2, but that onset phoneme and tone PA improve significantly from K3 to Grade 1. This suggests that pinyin instruction during Grade 1 effectively facilitates pupils’ PA on onset and tone levels only. The above results are in line with the ‘grain size theory’ proposed by Ziegler and Goswami (2005) on the sequence of PA development, where large unit PA, such as syllable, is normally acquired before schooling, but small unit PA, such as phoneme, develops later after receiving formal education. However, it is interesting that tone PA, a suprasegmental level, only improves significantly after schooling.
However, apart from the syllable task, the reliability of the other three tasks is less than 0.5 (rime: 0.49; onset: 0.28; tone: 0.37). This was attributed to the receptive design and high probability of guessing with only two options provided by the
researchers. More options were suggested by the researchers to improve the reliability of the design. In addition, the stimuli of the PA tasks are real words with a picture. This means that the PA tasks do not totally eliminate the influence of lexical ability, which might be another reason for low reliability, since children’s vocabulary span was not controlled and might be a confounding factor.
School-age Children
Xu, Dong, Yang and Wang (2004) investigated the trajectory of PA development in school-age Mandarin-speaking children in Mainland China through both longitudinal and cross-sectional studies. In the longitudinal study, 45 Grade 1 children were tested at the beginning (T1), middle (T2) and end (T3) of their first school year. The PA tests administered were odd one out tasks at the level of onset, rime and tone. A phoneme deletion task was not conducted until T2. At the beginning of schooling, accuracy scores were low (range 32-35%); and there was no significant difference in onset, rime and tone tasks. However, tone PA improved significantly across the three time points. But in contrast, onset and rime PA improved significantly only in the
second half of Grade 1 between T2 and T3. The phoneme task tested at T2 and T3 is the most difficult task and performance lagged behind the other three PA tasks even though it improved significantly from T2 to T3. The cross-sectional part of the study investigated 89 children in Grade 1;114 in Grade 3 and 117 in Grade 5. The same tasks were presented in both the cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. It was found that the tone and rime PA reached their plateau (accuracy : 87 per cent) at Grade 3, while onset and phoneme PA continued to improve across the three time points, but were still less than the tone and rime PA at Grade 5 in accuracy level. The researchers argue that PA performance at tone, onset and rime levels were similar at the time of school entrance because of the syllable-based features of Mandarin. Therefore, sub-syllabic PA does not develop until well after the pinyin system is introduced in formal education. More specifically, instruction in the pinyin system provides orthography support, including tone marks, for children becoming aware of
sub-syllabic PA symbols, and speedy development of tone PA. It is very possible that, during the instruction, some form of phonological awareness training is included.
Although the reliability of each task is high, the stimuli used in the tasks are all real words. Thus, it is impossible to eliminate the influence of lexical knowledge. In addition, only the phoneme level in the deletion task was an explicit task. Therefore, its result might not be comparable to the implicit PA tasks, i.e., odd one out tasks, at other linguistic levels. Unfortunately, no average age for the cohort was mentioned in the section on the participants, and the correlation between PA and reading was not investigated in the study.
Chan, Hu and Wan (2005) investigated phonemic awareness in 192
Mandarin-speaking Taiwanese children in Grade 4 (aged around 9;5) in order to know whether children speaking a syllabic language which does not follow the alphabetic principle in its written form would develop phonemic awareness. Sound oddity tasks were used to measure participants’ onset-rime and phoneme (nucleus or coda) PA.
Participants were asked to select the odd one at the onset, rime or phoneme level from three monosyllabic words. It was found that the cohort performed better on the
onset-rime task. Approximately 92 percent of the cohort performed above chance level on the phoneme PA task. Hu examined whether their phonemic awareness could be attributed to their English vocabulary skills, but only a moderate correlation was found between these two measures. Therefore, Hu argued that the development of phonemic awareness in Mandarin-speaking children might come from their
experience of learning ZF, a semi-syllabic orthography system, rather than from their spoken language.
PA of Mandarin-speaking Children with Speech Difficulties
If PA is a measure of the integrity of the speech processing system underlying literacy acquisition (Stackhouse & Wells, 1997), then children who have difficulties within this speech processing system may show atypical patterns of PA development. A study of 410 preschool children aged between 5 and 6 years in Taiwan showed that around 6.1 per cent of the cohort had speech and/or language disorders (Cheng, Chen, Tsai, Chen, & Cherng, 2009). However, very few studies have focused on the PA performance of Mandarin-speaking children with speech and/or language difficulties.
One study by Yen (2005) adopted a matched pair design to compare the PA performance before and after a ten-week ZF course of 17 typically developing children and 17 children with phonological disorders in Grade 1 inTaoyuan, Taiwan. It was found that the children with a phonological disorder performed less well on syllable deletion, onset deletion and onset matching tasks than the controls, both before and after the intense ZF course. In addition, there were significant differences in ZF dictation, spelling and reading aloud at ZF letters, wordsand tones between the two groups.
The above results suggest that, compared to typically developing children, children with a speech difficulty may also have difficulties with PA at both large unit (syllable) and small unit (onset phoneme) level. It seems that for children with speech difficulty acquiring literacy skills of a semi-syllabic system, such as ZF, which highlights phonological analysis and synthesis processes might lead to a disadvantage. In addition, poor PA skills at the beginning of schooling may influence the performance on literacy tasks in ways which are not limited to specific linguistic levels. For example, in the above study, ZF dictation and marking of tones on ZF words were poor in the atypical group even though there was no significant difference in tone PA between the two groups.
In summary, Mandarin-speaking preschool children show varying levels of PA
development, depending on their experience with literacy, the aspect of PA measured, and how it was measured. Some children in Mainland China might not acquire
measurable PA at onset-rime level until they receive formal education. Given that Mandarin is a monosyllabic language, emergent phonemic awareness was found among school-age children and was attributed to the systematic ZF course at the time of school entrance. Moreover, Mandarin-speaking children with a speech difficulty perform less well on PA tasks than their typically developing peer group. More studies of the relationship between PA and spoken language skills in
Mandarin-speaking children are necessary in order to reveal how children acquire literacy on the foundation of verbal competence.