Poster #107 - An Item Level Examination of Monolingual and Multilingual Children's English Phonological Awareness

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Language, Communication

Integrative Statement

Phonological awareness, the understanding of the sound structure of language, is crucial to literacy skill development (Foy & Mann, 2006). Yet for bilingual or multilingual children, it is unclear whether the use of more than one language relates to strengths or weaknesses in phonological awareness skills: multilingual children may develop stronger skills due to greater exposure to various phonological forms, or they may have weaknesses resulting from irregularities between languages in phonological patterns. Empirical results at the broad phonological awareness have yielded inconsistent results (e.g., Branum-Martin et al., 2012; Wren et al., 2013). The goal of this study is to examine phonological awareness at a more fine-grained level to consider differences between monolingual and multilingual children at the item and subskill level.

The present study assessed 3- to 7-year-olds’ phonological awareness skills (n=65 monolingual; n=65 multilingual). For multilingual children, parents reported that their child used another home language besides English and understood or spoke little English. Twenty-eight languages were represented, reducing the possibility that a shared native language affected results. Monolingual children were chosen from a larger group (n=966) and matched with the multilingual participants to the extent possible for socioeconomic status, child ethnicity, age, and gender. Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT-4; Dunn & Dunn, 2007) scores for multilingual children ranged from 34 to 159 (M=89.00; SD=26.41) and monolingual children from 31 to 166 (M=98.02; SD=32.00).

Children responded to 60 phonological awareness items addressing rhyming, blending, or segmenting. Children were provided a recorded prompt and selected the picture best representing the correct answer (e.g., for blending: “Dol… phin. What is the whole word?” played while illustrations appeared of a birdhouse, dolphin, and highchair).

We used Rasch measurement analyses, with a response cutoff technique used to mitigate chance responses (i.e., guessing) in Winsteps Rasch analysis software (Linacre, 2018). Results indicated that data fit the model well and that items measured a unidimensional construct, with strong item reliability (.96). Monolingual examinees performed better overall when compared to multilingual children in Rasch logit units: (monolingual M = 1.23, range: -0.88 to 5.60; multilingual M = 0.40, range: -1.66 to 5.50). When investigated at the item level, multilingual children were more likely overall to succeed on segmentation items than monolingual children after controlling for overall level of phonological awareness. For blending and rhyming items, there was some differential item functioning for particular items within each subtest but no advantage for one group. These findings suggest that multilingual children may be slightly more sensitive to removing sounds or syllables from words. Similar to prior work with older participants (Loizou & Stuart, 2003; Marinova-Todd et al., 2010), this work suggests that multilingual students may have different phonological awareness strengths when compared to monolingual peers.

Authors

• Sarah Goodwin, Human Development and Family Studies, Michigan State University
  Presenting Author

• Lori Skibbe, Michigan State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Gary Troia, Michigan State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ryan P. Bowles, Michigan State University
  Non-Presenting Author