Narrative Skills of Chinese-English Bilingual Children: Age-Related Patterns and Cross-Linguistic Associations with Phonological Awareness

Narrative competence is critical for children's language and cognitive development. However, few studies examine Chinese-English bilingual children, and very few examine the influence of phonological awareness (PA) on bilingual children's narrative development. This quantitative study used a battery of Chinese and English parallel phonological and narrative tasks to examine the developmental trend of narrative skills and their relationship with PA. 116 Chinese-English bilingual children aged between three and six participated in the study. The data yielded several critical results based on one-way ANOVA, correlation, and linear regression. Children's narrative skills in Chinese and English increased with age, but the developmental trend varied by language. PA significantly correlated with narrative skills in both languages, and its influence on narrative skills can be generalized across languages. English syllable segmentation and Chinese narrative skills predicted English narrative skills significantly; Chinese non-word repetition, Chinese phoneme segmentation, Chinese rhyming discrimination, and English narrative skills predicted children's Chinese narrative skills significantly. This study reinforced the importance of PA in earlier childhood bilingual education and highlighted its positive cross-language association between bilingual children's narrative skills.