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The role of phonological memory and phonological awareness in foreign language (FL) word learning was examined. Measures of phonological memory and phonological awareness were administered to 58 Chinesespeaking 4-year-olds 4 times (T1 to T4) across 2 years. FL (English) word learning was assessed at T3, and children's ability to relearn the words was assessed at T4. Phonological memory was related to FL word learning at T3, whereas phonological awareness was not. However, phonological awareness emerged as a significant predictor at T4, even after allowing for FL word learning at T3 and phonological memory. The results suggest that phonological memory and phonological awareness may support FL word learning, but phonological awareness may play a specific role when the words are relearned.Recently, a growing body of research has begun to support the notion of learning disabilities in the field of foreign language

This research investigates the influence of phonological awareness on the learning of vocabulary in a foreign language. Thirty-seven Chinese-speaking third graders with high phonological awareness and 37 with low phonological awareness participated in multitrial word learning tasks involving nonnative sounding (English) new names paired with novel referents. The children also participated in three additional associative learning tasks: learning to associate novel native sounding names, familiar native names, and unfamiliar visual shapes with unfamiliar referents. Results indicated that children with lower phonological awareness learned both the novel nonnative names and the novel native names less accurately than children with higher phonological awareness and required more learning trials. However, these two groups did not differ in learning to associate familiar names or unfamiliar visual shapes with novel referents. The findings suggest that poor phonological awareness might slow nonnative acquisition of vocabulary via difficulty in constructing new phonological representations for new words.To adults who are proficient readers and writers, it seems quite obvious that spoken words are composed of strings of discrete phonological segments. However, for children the insight that words are composed of discrete segments comes gradually, often as a result of literacy instruction. To many young children, and even to some adolescents and adults, a word is a word, distinguishable from other words holistically in terms of pitch contours, rhythm, stress, increased duration, and strong-weak template; however, the segmental details of the word are obscured by the overall phonological shape of the word. Knowledge of the discrete sound segments of language, that is, phonological awareness, has been found to relate to poor performance on a number of language processing tasks, such as naming objects and pictures (

This study investigated the nature of morphological awareness and its relation to learning to read Chinese characters among 46 Chinese-speaking preschool children. The children took a morphological awareness task, which varied in semantic transparency and morpheme position. Children's vocabulary knowledge and extant character reading ability were measured. Additionally, a character learning task was administered. Results showed that children's performances on morphological awareness were affected by semantic transparency but not by morpheme position. Morphological awareness was related to vocabulary knowledge when partialling out character reading ability but not to character reading ability after partialling out vocabulary knowledge. The results of the character learning task further revealed that morphological awareness was related to character identification in the words that were just taught but not to character identification in the words that were not taught or in pseudowords. The relation between morphological awareness and character identification ceased to be significant when partialling out the variance in children's prior knowledge of the characters to be learnt. Taken together, the findings suggested that vocabulary knowledge may play a more important role than reading ability in the initial development of morphological awareness and that the facilitative effect of morphological knowledge in reading does not seem to be significant in the very initial stages of reading acquisition.

The effect of capitalizing on orthography in auditory learning of English words was examined in 74 children who spoke Mandarin Chinese as their primary language. To use orthographic information for auditory word learning, children must recode printed words phonologically to assist the reconstruction of the speech single misheard or underspecified, an ability that may depend heavily on phonological awareness (PA). In this study, children with poorer PA of Chinese and those with better PA were taught novel English words in an auditory learning task under two exposure conditions: auditory words presented with their written forms and auditory words presented with undecodable symbols. Word learning performance was better in the written form condition than in the symbol condition, but the effect was smaller for children with poorer PA. The facilitative effect was associated with L2 PA for children with poorer PA but not for children with better PA. The results are discussed with regard to how poor PA may constrain auditory word learning in an L2 context.Keywords L2 word learning Á Orthography Á Phonological awareness Á Vocabulary acquisition It has been shown that orthographic inputs facilitate word learning/memory over phonological inputs in adults (