Purpose: This study investigates how Mandarin-English bilingual students in Canada produce Mandarin tones and how this is influenced by factors such as tone complexity, cross-linguistic influences, and speech input. Method: Participants were 82 students enrolled in a Chinese bilingual program in Western Canada. Students were recruited from Grades…

Purpose: The study aimed to examine whether oral reading prosody--the use of acoustic features (e.g., pitch and duration variations) when reading passages aloud--predicts reading fluency and comprehension abilities. Method: We measured vocabulary, syntax, word reading, reading fluency (including rate and accuracy), reading comprehension (in Grades…

Purpose: Cantonese lexical tone awareness is closely associated with 1st language Cantonese vocabulary knowledge, but its role in 2nd language English vocabulary knowledge was unclear. We addressed this issue by investigating whether and, if so, how Cantonese lexical tone awareness contributes to English expressive vocabulary knowledge in Hong…

Two studies explored the nature of phonological awareness (PA) in Chinese. In Study 1, involving 146 children, awareness of phoneme onset did not differ from chance levels at ages 3-5 years in preschool but increased to 70% correct in first grade, when children first received phonological coding (Pinyin) instruction. Similarly, tone awareness was…

Using Mandarin Chinese, a "tone language" in which the pitch contours of syllables differentiate words, the authors examined the acoustic modifications of infant-directed speech (IDS) at the syllable level to test 2 hypotheses: (a) the overall increase in pitch and intonation contour that occurs in IDS at the phrase level would not distort…