Cantonese children are better at onset-rime than Mandarin speakers
Chen, X., Anderson, R. C., Li, W., Hao, M., Wu, X., & Shu, H. (2004). Phonological awareness of bilingual and monolingual Chinese children. Journal of Educational Psychology. vol (96) 1. 142-151.[Abstract]
Phonological awareness of bilingual and monolingual Chinese children
X.Chen, R. C. Anderson, W. Li, M. Hao, X. Wu, and H. Shu
The effect of bilingualism on the development of phonological awareness of Chinese children was investigated in two studies comparing bilingual speakers of both Cantonese and Mandarin with monolingual speakers of Mandarin. Cantonese-speaking children had developed more advanced onset and rime awareness by grade two, as they learned Mandarin in school and became bilingual. Bilingualism seemed to accelerate the development of phonological awareness. But the advantage had mostly disappeared by grade four. On the other hand, in the first grade Cantonese-speaking children had more advanced tone awareness than Mandarin-speaking children. This was likely because Cantonese has a more complicated tone system than Mandarin.
July 3rd, 2004 at 9:11 am e
I think these are children in the Mainland and not Hong Kong SAR, who are probably learning both Mandarin and pinyin in school, although it will be interesting to look at the details. So they may be somewhat bilingual, which could lead to better metalinguistic performance.