| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 語言學研究所 === 90 === This study investigates the possible transfers in Chinese-English bilingual children’s phonological awareness abilities. Sixty kindergarten children in Taipei divided into two age groups with an average age of 5;3 and 6;3 respectively, whose English proficiency was lower than their mother tongue, Chinese, participated in a series of tests. An English proficiency test was first administrated to understand these children’s command of English. Then, phonological awareness pre-tests in Chinese and English were used to tap these children’s phonological awareness in both languages. Tests include initial consonant/rhyme detection test, initial consonant deletion test, and initial consonant/rhyme substitution tests. Based on the causal link between articulation and phonological awareness, an English articulation training was given to the experimental group of children after the pre-tests, to examine whether enhanced English phonological awareness skills transfer to Chinese. Results showed that phonological awareness acquired in L1 were also found in L2. A period of articulation training in English led to an improvement of these children’s performances in both English and Chinese, which implies a backward transfer from weaker L2 to stronger L1. The transfer found in these unbalanced bilinguals offers an empirical support to Cummins’ interdependence hypothesis (1981), which stated that given effective instructions in a language, its improved proficiency in this language will transfer to another one. Cross-language transfers in phonological awareness abilities also imply that an abstract underlying capacity facilitates language processing across languages.
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