This study evaluates the extent to which syntactic awareness contributes to reading comprehension in English-French bilinguals, considering both the potential for a direct relation, as well as an indirect one, through word reading. Participants were 146 first-grade students enrolled in early French immersion programs in Canada. While the children…

Reading comprehension performance is predicted by decoding skill and linguistic comprehension (e.g., Hoover & Gough, 1990; Joshi & Aaron, 2012; Scarborough, 2001). However, the type of strategies that readers recruit to build a discourse should also contribute to success in first and second language reading comprehension. Sixty-six French…

The present study aimed to examine the contributions of two separate Pinyin skills and oral vocabulary to Chinese word reading of 70 third graders in a U.S. Mandarin Immersion program where Pinyin was introduced at Grade 3. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that Pinyin initial-final spelling--the skill to spell Chinese syllables using Pinyin…

As children learn to read, they become sensitive to the patterns that exist in the ways in which their language(s) are represented in print. This skill is known as orthographic processing. We examined the nature of orthographic processing in English and French for children in the first grade of a French immersion program, and the relationship…