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The similarity of phonological skills underpinning reading ability in shallow and deep
orthographies: a bilingual perspective.
Victor Martinelli* - Department of Education Studies, Faculty of Education, University of
Malta
*Email: victor.martinelli@um.edu.mt
ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0121-4444
Bernardette Brincat - Department of Education Studies, Faculty of Education, University of
Malta
Biographical note
Author 1
Victor Martinelli is an associate professor in the Department of Education Studies at the
University of Malta. He currently occupies the position of head in the Department of
Education Studies. He teaches various study units in psychology of education and some
element of research and measurement in education and psychology. He is currently involved
in an international study about school climate in primary and secondary schools. Victor
Martinelli is an associate editor of the Malta Review of Educational Research and a reviewer
for a number of local and international journals and conferences. He has an interest in literacy
issues and achievement and has published in this area. He is an associate fellow of the British
Psychological Society (BPS), a member of the BPS’s Division of Educational and Child
Psychology, a past member of the European Federation of Psychological Associations
Standing Committee on Tests and Testing and of the Malta Psychology Professions Board. He
is a BPS chartered psychologist, a Health & Care Professions Council registered practitioner
psychologist, a Science Council Chartered Scientist and holds a EuroPsy warrant.
1
Author 2
Bernadette Brincat received a Bachelor’s Degree in Education from the University of Malta
in 2000. For several years, she participated in several national literacy programmes. This
sparked her enthusiasm for differentiated teaching. She continued to further her studies at the
University of Malta by reading a Master’s Degree in Access to Education with a
specialisation in Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLD). She works as a literacy specialist,
supporting children with additional educational needs.
2
The similarity of phonological skills underpinning reading ability in shallow and deep
orthographies: a bilingual perspective.
Abstract
Reading comprehension relies on the integration of phonological, semantic, syntactic and
pragmatic language abilities and early reading success is attributed to several interrelated
factors. The current study investigated one of these skills, phonological awareness and its
relation to six-year-old children’s mastery in reading Maltese and English. The researchers
recruited eighty-two bilingual participants attending bilingual schools in Malta and
administered two parallel batteries comprising a word reading test and phonological
tests/tasks in the two respective languages. Descriptive statistics indicated suitability for
further analysis. The Bartlett’s test of sphericity and the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of
sampling adequacy showed that the data were suitable for multivariate exploration. Principal
components analysis identified clear componential structures in both language batteries. A
statistical regression analysis identified similar phonological underpinnings across the two
single word reading measures. The results showed that specific measures of phonological
awareness constituted common phonological underpinnings of reading performance in both
Maltese and English, although to different degrees. The results support the notion of
similarity in the patterns of association of skills sustaining reading across Maltese and
English in bilingual children. The view that the phonological skills driving reading
development across alphabetic languages may not differ substantially between different
orthographies is supported.
3
Keywords: phonological awareness; bilingual learners; English; Maltese; universality.
Data set pre-registered doi:10.5281/zenodo.3568298
Funding details: This work is not supported by any grant.
Disclosure statement: No potential conflict of interest.
The submitted article, including references and tables, is 8175 words long.
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The similarity of phonological skills underpinning reading ability in shallow and deep
orthographies: a bilingual perspective.
Introduction
It is generally agreed that reading comprehension relies on the integration of phonological,
semantic, syntactic and pragmatic language abilities (Kamhi & Catts, 2012). Early readers
possess good phonological awareness and letter-sound knowledge enabling the development
of reading fluency, use of vocabulary and comprehension strategies to access the meaning of
the written text (Ehri et al., 2001; Kamhi & Catts, 2012). Phonological skills assist children’s
reading development not only in English, but also in other languages (Al-Bataineh & Sims-
King, 2013; Yeung, Siegel, & Chan, 2013).
Phonological awareness is “children’s ability to reflect, process, conceptualize and
manipulate the sub-lexical segments of spoken language such as syllables, onset and rimes,
and phonemes” (Elbeheri & Everatt, 2007, p. 273). Children progress from larger units of
phoneme awareness like rhymes and syllables to smaller and increasingly complex units of
sound (Cassady, Smith, & Putman, 2008; Schuele & Boudreau, 2008). In the Anglocentric
world of current reading research, weak phonological awareness usually precedes reading
problems in the early school years across alphabetic languages (Blachman, Ball, Black, &
Tangel, 2000; Ehri et al., 2001; Goswami, 2000; Pressley, 2006). Phonological awareness
plays a stronger role in predicting reading outcomes than intelligence, vocabulary, listening
comprehension, and socioeconomic status (Catts & Kamhi, 2005; Gillon, 2018). However,
orthographic transparency and phonological granularity mediate phonological awareness
because children who speak Turkish, Greek, or Italian attain syllable awareness more quickly
than children who speak French or English (Cossu, Shankweiler, Liberman, Katz, & Tola,
1988; Demont & Gombert, 1996; Durgunoğlu & Oney, 1999). While firmly established, the
5
importance of the specific language mechanisms at play remains somewhat controversial
(Castles & Coltheart, 2004; Elbro & Pallesen, 2002; Hatcher et al., 2006; Muter, Hulme,
Snowling, & Stevenson, 2004). Within the family of European alphabets (Daniels & Share,
2018), phonological awareness is critical to successful reading development, characterises
good readers, and reliably predicts later reading skill in children from preschool through sixth
grade (Smith, Simmons, & Kameenui, 1998).
A second perspective suggests that children’s phonological ability develops as a result
of direct reading instruction, but this is a Eurocentric/alphabetocentric perspective that
ignores other non-European writing systems (Daniels & Share, 2018). A third perspective
supports a bi-directional reciprocal link between phonological skills and reading attainment.
Appropriate levels of phonological awareness facilitate reading development and at the same
time, successful reading experiences promote phonological awareness skills (Goswami, 2000;
Puolakanaho et al., 2007).
Against this background, one can consider phonological development characterised
by large-to-small sequencing as in the Lexical Restructuring model (Metsala & Walley, 1998)
and by the Psycholinguistic Grain Size model (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). The reciprocity
between phonological awareness and the development of literacy was established in
alphabetic languages such as German (Mann & Wimmer, 2002), French, (Demont &
Gombert, 1996), Norwegian (Høien, Lundberg, Stanovich, & Bjaalid, 1995), Turkish,
(Durgunoğlu & Oney, 1999), Italian (Cossu, Shankweiler, Liberman, Katz, & Tola, 1988) and
English (Perfetti, Beck, Bell, & Hughes, 1987; Tunmer & Nesdale, 1986).
Phonological awareness
In alphabetocentric systems, phonological awareness ranges from beginning sound
recognition and rhyming word recognition through to syllable segmentation, phoneme
isolation, blending, and manipulation. Rhyme and alliteration awareness constitute the first
6
developing components of the phonological awareness continuum (Reynolds, Callihan, &
Browning, 2003) and represent simple levels of awareness in an increasingly complex
hierarchy of phonological awareness skills (McBride-Chang, Bialystok, Chong, & Lic, 2004).
So significant is the relationship between rhyme and literacy acquisition in Anglophone
languages, that children’s inability to recognise rhyme is thought to be an early sign of
reading disability (Bradley & Bryant, 1991; Goswami & Bryant, 1990; MacLean, Bryant, &
Bradley, 1987).
Rhyme oddity and rhyme generation constitute measures of rhyme awareness with the
latter involving the retrieving and generation of rhymes (Stuart-Smith & Martin, 1999).
Syllable awareness develops just after rhyme awareness and is also predictive of early
reading progress (Muter et al., 2004; Yopp & Yopp, 2009). After syllable awareness, phoneme
awareness becomes crucial to reading development in novice readers, more so than rhyme
(Yopp & Yopp, 2009). Generally, phoneme counting tasks were more useful for predicting
literacy skills in transparent than in opaque orthographies as evident in Cossu et al. (1988),
Durgunoğlu & Oney (1999), Harris & Giannouli (1999) and Wimmer, Mayringer, and
Landerl (2000) in their work with Italian, Turkish, Greek and German first-graders.
Pulling apart the sounds in a word (segmentation) is a sensitive index of literacy
success (van Bon & van Leeuwe, 2003; Yopp, 1988). Measures of phoneme deletion at five
and six years are strong predictors of reading achievement at nine years of age with phoneme
deletion, which is a notch above the other measures in difficulty level, proving to be a good
predictor throughout (Hulme et al., 2002; Muter et al., 2004). Phoneme elision was a strong
predictor of real and pseudo-word reading in Greek and Cypriot learners (Papadopoulos,
2001). Letter identification is known to have a robust relationship with reading ability
generally (Lesaux & Siegel, 2003). This claim also appears to be true of languages with a
7
shallow orthography, like Maltese with the awareness of letter sounds, helping Maltese
children gain phonological insight (Xuereb, 2009).
At this stage, one may specify the differences between ‘phonological awareness’ and
‘phoneme awareness’. Walsh (2009) describes phonological awareness as a broader term used
to encapsulate a range of spoken word features such as syllables, onset-rime, and phonemes.
Phoneme awareness is more specific and assumes conscious knowledge of individual speech
sounds in words.
One of the central issues in bilingualism research is how the language and literacy
skills that children acquire simultaneously may be related to one another. Ziegler and
Goswami (2005, 2006) proposed that the orthography of a given language determines a
speaker’s reliance on either the lexical or non-lexical route to reading. Their Psycholinguistic
Grain Size Theory of Reading posits that reading in consistent orthographies involves small
linguistic units, whereas reading in inconsistent orthographies requires the use of larger units
as well. Children who are learning more orthographically transparent languages rely heavily
on small linguistic units because grapheme-phoneme correspondences are quite regular.
Conversely, children who are learning less orthographically consistent languages, cannot
have natural recourse to smaller unit recoding strategies (or grain sizes) due to the relative
inconsistency of print-to-sound mapping.
Malta has a complex language-learning context which knows its origins to its recent
colonial heritage. Most Maltese are bilingual in Maltese and English to varying degrees, but
with one language being dominant (Fabri, 2011; Grech & McLeod, 2011). While on the one
hand Maltese is reported to be the language most frequently used at home by 90% of the
population aged 10 years and over, and English by 6% of the population, Maltese does not
hold sway alone (Vella, 2013). When it comes to the written medium, a culture survey
(National Statistics Office, 2011) revealed that written English was preferred by 44.5 % of the
8
population, compared to the use of written Maltese, at 43.1 %. When asked about their
preferred language when reading, 46.3 % opted for English, while 38.6 % preferred Maltese.
English is valued for its instrumental value and prestige, while Maltese is associated with
more integrative and identity feelings (Bonnici, 2010; Caruana, 2007).
Language use in Malta constitutes bilingualism without diglossia (Camilleri-Grima,
2000). The regular use of English alongside Maltese in daily interactions results in a
continuum from dialect, to standard Maltese to mixed Maltese and English to authentic
bilingual use (Vella, 2013). In the same vein, the European Council considers bilingualism to
be continuous rather than dichotomous (Gazzola, 2016). Although all schools in Malta teach
in both languages, literacy instruction varies across school types (Xuereb, Grech, & Dodd,
2011). One is referred to Camilleri-Grima (2013), and Gatt and Dodd (2020) for insight into
Maltese-English bilingualism in education in Malta.
Independent schools use English as their language of instruction (Bonnici, 2010), but
state schools tend to use Maltese (Vallejo & Dooly, 2009). Church schools are generally more
balanced using both languages according to need (Firman, 2007; Sammut, 2014). Current
educational policy in Malta promotes bilingual education in all schools (Ministry for
Education and Employment, Malta, 2014) and the general policy is one of balanced language
and literacy use of Maltese and English (Mifsud & Vella, 2018). The majority of state schools
start with Maltese, whereas the independent and several church schools start with English,
but this depends to some extent on the demographic context of the school. Around 36% of
students in compulsory education attend church schools (Eurydice, 2020). Church schools are
technically free of charge because teacher salaries are paid for by the national exchequer.
However, they do request a small monetary contribution to help with the upkeep of the
school, although this is not mandatory. In principle, church schools are open to everyone
through a ballot system because the number of applications for a place in the church school
9
sector exceeds the number of places available. However, families with limited budgets may
shy clear of applying because of incurred additional costs, such as distinctive uniforms,
school books and additional day to day educational costs. Generally speaking, there is a
tendency for parents of children attending this sector to be well educated, but there are
numerous exceptions.
In young bilinguals, the development of L2 appears to depend also on related
underlying phonological skills as in L1 (Dressler & Kamil, 2006). Consequently, access to
more than one language code leads to stronger phonological awareness due to increased
exposure to oral language (Bialystok & Herman, 1999), cross-language transfer (Kuo &
Anderson, 2010) and increased metalinguistic skills (Laurent & Martinot, 2010). Studies
investigating cross-language transfer at the phonological level have successfully
demonstrated its existence in French-English (Comeau, Cormier, Grandmaison, & Lacroix,
1999), Hebrew-English (Geva & Siegel, 2000), Italian-English (D’Angiulli, Siegel, & Serra,
2001), Spanish-English (Durgunoğlu, Nagy, & Hancin-Bhatt, 1993), English-Spanish (García
& Kleifgen, 2010) and Dutch-English (Patel, Snowling, & de Jong, 2004). Cross-linguistic
transfer occurs when two languages share a specific feature, and when that feature is more
salient in Language 1 (L1) than in Language 2 (L2) such that being proficient in L1 can
facilitate its use in L2 (al Mannai & Everatt, 2005; Caravolas et al., 2012; Caravolas, Lervåg,
Defior, Seidlová Málková, & Hulme, 2013; Kuo & Anderson, 2010).
Theoretically, bilingual learners may express the differences they encounter in the
orthographic depth through their rate of reading development (Seymour, Aro, & Erskine,
2003) but the process is similar (Vaessen, Bertrand, Denes, & Blomert, 2010). Vaessen et al.
postulate that cognitive development of fluent word reading (in alphabetic scripts) follows a
similar pattern in orthographies varying in the consistency of their letter–speech sound
mappings (Hungarian, Dutch, and Portuguese). However, the contributions of phonological
10
awareness and letter–speech sound processing to reading fluency proved necessary for longer
in opaque than in transparent orthographies. They suggest that orthographic consistency does
influence the rate at which the reading system develops, but not the stages in which it does.
Although most predictors of reading performance are deemed to be universal across
alphabetic languages, their precise weight varies systematically as a function of script
transparency (Saiegh-Haddad & Geva, 2010; Ziegler et al., 2010). English and Maltese differ
in relation to their orthographies with the former deemed to have a deep, opaque orthography
in which phonology does not always clearly guide word spelling or reading (Gorman &
Gillam, 2003) and the latter having a shallow, transparent orthography through which word
phonology maps consistently onto orthography (Xuereb, 2009).
Materials and method
The current study investigated the underlying phonological skills in six-year-old children’s
mastery in reading Maltese and English. Grade 2 (age 7-8 years) is considered to be critical to
children’s reading development since, at this time, word-attack ability develops rapidly
(Logan et al., 2013). The church school sector in Malta was deemed best suited for this study
due to a balanced language approach and the clear bilingual context of this sector. Most
children in Malta are fully aware of the second language through their exposure to books in
English, environmental print, code-switching and the media. Societal bilingualism
encourages parents to acclimatise their children to Maltese and English virtually from birth.
This renders monolingual home exposure rare while making for a stable and unified bilingual
context (Gatt & Dodd, 2020). The languages of schooling exist in the wider out-of-school
environment, and learners are in contact with both Maltese and English (Mifsud & Vella,
2018). Most of the larger church schools adopt English as their language of communication
in class but not to the exclusion of Maltese. At the lower primary level, such as the age of the
children in this study, learners exposed to English at home would find it easier to follow
11
activities conducted in English. Notwithstanding, those exposed mainly to spoken Maltese at
home usually adapt quickly. Mifsud and Vella (2018) provide us with intimate glimpses of the
bilingual language dynamics of a church school classroom. They describe how the teacher
used flexible bilingualism, adaptive pedagogies and non-verbal communication to facilitate
understanding. The equal weight that is given to both languages in the curriculum and the
switching that occurs within a balanced approach ensures that in the church school sector,
children attain comparable competence in both languages.
In this study, the researchers explored if in the Maltese-English bilingual context, the
phonological skills that children brought to bear on early reading development differed. This
investigation was intended to identify those processing components that were common to
both language systems and those that were language-specific. The second author collected the
data during the first term of the 2016-17 scholastic year. After due piloting, pruning and
modification of the broader test battery, this author compiled shorter parallel batteries of
phonological tests in each language. These tests validly investigated the specificity of the
phonological awareness tasks underpinning reading and yielded maximum variance.
At this stage, one must address the issue of the comparability of phonological
awareness tasks across languages. Eviatar, Taha and Shwartz (2018) used virtually identical
tests of phonological awareness in Hebrew and Arabic because Hebrew and Arabic are both
Semitic languages with similar semantic and phonological features. Maltese has an Arabic
base (written in the Roman alphabet) with the grafting of lexical elements of Italian and
English in particular, but retaining a Semitic morphological and syntactic structure (Fabri,
2010). While English constitutes many nouns with a CVC construction, Maltese has few such
nouns; many monosyllabic nouns have CCVC and CVCC constructions. The various tasks
used in the testing procedures reflected the phonological characteristics of both languages and
were parallel, but two were not fully phonologically comparable (Share, 2008). These two
12
were the rhyme oddity and rhyme generation measures. Here, some words used in the
Maltese version of the tasks were bisyllabic, but the majority of the words used in the English
version were monosyllabic.
The authors adhered strictly to all the procedures laid down by the institutional ethics
committee for recruiting participants. Eighty six-year-old, bilingual, typically developing
pupils of Maltese heritage were recruited from six church schools. Two reading tests were
administered to the children individually to assess word decoding ability in Maltese and
English, and to select average readers for this study. Only participants with average word
reading accuracy participated in the study in a bid to guard against floor or ceiling effects.
The participants completed the phonological test battery in two 20-minute sessions.
For reading, the authors adopted the Maltese Word Reading Test (Bartolo, 1988)
normed on a locally representative population of 1,160 children aged 6:00-10:06 and the York
Assessment of Reading for Comprehension Single Word Reading Test (Snowling et al.,
2009). Both these tests provided a measure of children’s word reading skills. Identical
administration and discontinuation procedures of eight consecutive mistakes were adopted.
The parallel phonological tasks in Maltese and English constituted tests of syllable
segmentation, rhyme awareness and generation, phoneme segmentation, elision, sound
matching (initial and final) and phoneme substitution. All the tests were preceded by two or
three practice trials to help instruct the participants in the task, followed by the administration
of the test items. The second author provided corrective feedback during the practice trials
but not during the test itself. The order of administration of the tests was randomised for each
child to minimise practice and order effects. Some of the items used pictures to reduce
memory load.
Assessing at the syllabic level - syllable counting
The two parallel tasks devised for the current study employed the use of Maltese and English
real words. Children repeated up to four-syllable words and represented the syllables with
13
counters. This procedure was based on Cossu et al. (1988) with a slight variation in the
procedure.
Assessing at the rhyme level - rhyme oddity task and rhyme generation
In the Rhyme Oddity task, the assessor uttered three words in succession, and the participants
identified the two that shared the rhyming sound (e.g. fish, cap, tap). The second measure of
rhyme awareness, the Rhyme Generation task required participants to produce words that
rhymed with the stimulus word, thus demonstrating their ability to access, retrieve and
provide words with similar rhymes. Participants completed ten items in both Maltese and
English rhyme oddity and generation tasks with discontinuation set at four consecutive errors
according to the established convention (Muter, 1994).
Assessing at the phoneme level: alliteration (initial and final), phoneme segmentation,
phoneme elision, and phoneme substitution
The authors adopted Wagner, Torgesen, Rashotte, and Pearson’s (2013) Comprehensive Test
of Phonological Processing Sound Matching task to measure the extent to which children
could match the initial and final phoneme of a sound. In this 20-item measure, the examiner
said a word, paused, and then said three other words while pointing to drawings depicting all
four words. The first ten items assessed initial sound awareness and the second ten items
assessed final sound awareness in parallel English and Maltese language measures.
Wagner et al.’s (2013) Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing Elision task
was used to assess participants’ phoneme manipulation skills. The task consisted of 20 items
presented in ascending order of difficulty. Participants performed the deletion on various
units of sounds. The test manual guidelines advised discontinuation after three consecutive
incorrect attempts. A parallel task in Maltese accompanied the English version.
The Phoneme Substitution task was adopted from the Phonological Assessment
Battery 2 (Gibbs & Bodman, 2014). Participants were asked to replace the first sound of a
word with a new sound (e.g. ‘cot’ with a /g/ gives ‘got’) in ten test items. A parallel task in
Maltese accompanied the first. Five of the six single phonemes in the two tasks were
14
phonetically identical but, it was not possible to replicate the four consonant blends in the
English test if the words used were to possess the appropriate currency for the children’s age.
The authors adhered to the guidelines in the test manual advising discontinuation after three
consecutive mistakes or after three minutes had elapsed since the presentation of the first item
for both language versions.
In the Letter-Sound Knowledge task, each child was asked to identify the phonetic
sound of ten lowercase letters in random order to assess letter-knowledge in Maltese and
English. The individual letters were selected for their frequency in each language. The
phonetic sounds of the letters’ h’, ‘b’, and ‘e’ were common to both tests.
Results
Data obtained from this study were processed using IBM SPSS Statistics Version 23.
Normality of distribution of the dependent variables was assessed statistically and visually
according to procedures suggested by Maxwell and Delaney (2004). The Shapiro-Wilk test
indicated normality of score distribution with p-values exceeding the 0.05 level of
significance for the Maltese (.257) and English (.289) word reading tests respectively, These
results facilitated the use of a multiple linear regression model to identify the significant
predictors of Maltese and English word reading. Given the necessary brevity of each
phonological task, none of the independent variables achieved normal distribution, and while
undesirable, this was not unexpected.
The Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks test was used to compare children’s performance on the
Maltese and English phonological awareness tests. Stepwise regression analyses were
performed to determine the strength of association between each subtest and each of the two
measures of reading. Table 1 presents the scores for the whole cohort on the Maltese and
English word reading tests.
<Table 1 about here>
Table 2 shows the scores for the whole group on the phonological measures in Maltese and
English.
15
<Table 2 about here>
Given the relatively limited number of variables and fewer than the ideal number of
cases (less than 200 to 300), the authors were interested in an empirical summary of the data
set, using principal components analysis (PCA) (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2001). Bartlett’s test of
sphericity, which tests the overall significance of all the correlations within the Maltese and
English phonological awareness correlation matrix, was significant (χ2 (36) = 188.275,
p<0.001) and (χ2 (36) = 216.795, p<0.001) respectively, indicating that it was appropriate to
apply this model on the data set. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy for
the Maltese and English phonological data sets respectively was middling (KMO = .710,
KMO = .659) (Kaiser, 1974), indicating that the strength of the relationships among variables
was acceptably strong to proceed with the analysis.
A PCA was conducted for each of the two sets of phonological awareness tasks, with
coefficient correlations below .4 being suppressed. The scree plot suggested that a three
principal component rendering of the data was most efficient in both sets. Due to their
homogenous nature, an oblique rotation method was adopted. The pattern matrix for the
Maltese phonological data set identified three clear components accounting for 35%, 16%
and 12%, respectively of the variance. The pattern matrix for the English phonological data
set identified three equally clear components accounting for 35%, 16% and 13 %
respectively, of the variance.
The two PCAs for the two languages were very similar. The first component
constituted measures involving deep phoneme knowledge such as rhyme oddity, rhyme
generation, phoneme substitution, and elision. The second component constituted measures of
sound matching, requiring simpler awareness of phonology in both languages. The third
component constituted mainly measures of phonological awareness at the syllable level, as
shown in Tables 3 and 4 below.
<Table 3 about here>
<Table 4 about here>
16
One notable exception is the issue of the Maltese and English Phoneme Counting tasks that
featured prominently in the Maltese language pattern matrix but weakly in the English
language pattern matrix.
Collinearity among the variables was weak enough to introduce only minimal
imprecision to the regression model. The variance inflation factor (VIF) for each variable
never exceeded the value of 3, which is acceptable (Hair, Black, Babin and Anderson, 2010).
Zero-order correlations were generally low among the variables as shown in tables 5 and 6
below, only once reaching .7 with this being between the initial and final sound matching
measures in both languages. The inter-item correlation of the Maltese and English
phonological tasks was computed to be .240 and .204 respectively.
<Table 5 about here>
<Table 6 about here>
Due to the focus on cross-language transfer, the results of all the 18 phonological awareness
tasks in English and Maltese were entered in a non-hierarchical stepwise linear regression
equation together and regressed on the Maltese and English reading tests in turn. Four cross-
language skills from the 18 phonological awareness tasks were closely associated with
Maltese word reading. When linearly regressed onto the dependent variable to create the
optimal linear prediction equation Maltese Elision (β= .448), Maltese Sound Matching-Final
(β= .264), English Phoneme Counting (β= .225) and Maltese Letter-Sound Knowledge (β= .
170), F (4, 75) = 22.651, p . 001, accounted for .547 (55%) of the variance in Maltese word ˂
reading.
When the same procedure was repeated on the scores of the English reading test, four
cross-language phonological skills were closely associated with English word reading. When
linearly regressed onto the dependent variable to create the optimal linear prediction
equation: Maltese Elision (β= .375), English Elision (β= .352), English Syllable
Segmentation (β= .208), and Maltese Letter-Sound Knowledge (β= .204), F (4, 75) = 24.709,
p . 001, accounted for .569 (57%) of the variance in English word reading. Factors such as ˂
17
intelligence and suitable literacy environments at home also underpin children’s reading
ability, but 55% and 57% are nevertheless substantial amounts of explained variance.
Discussion
This study supports the notion of a specific relationship between children’s phonological
skills and reading. There is considerable similarity in the specificity of the phonological skills
associated with reading in both English and Maltese when these occur in the bilingual context
described in this study. Due to the balanced language approach, one would theoretically
expect similar results if this study were to be replicated across the other two sectors of the
Maltese educational system, but the findings could be somewhat ambivalent because of an
element of language bias dependent on the school sector. Despite regressing 18 variables in
two languages, the contributing skills to Maltese reading were essentially Maltese
phonological skills, with the one exception of the phoneme counting skill in English.
Therefore, removing sounds and reconstructing new words, matching sounds and applying
knowledge of letter sounds in Maltese leads to good level skills in reading in Maltese. The
presence of the English phoneme counting skill is out of keeping with the other variables, but
it may hold its place due to its robust nature as a predictor of later reading development
(Hulme et al., 2002; Muter et al., 2004).
When the scores for all 18 phonological awareness variables were regressed on to
English, two Maltese and two English phonological skills predicted English word reading.
Therefore, it appears that bilingual Maltese children may be depending on both Maltese and
English based phonological skills to read English correctly. While Maltese Elision was the
most robust predictor of Maltese word reading, Elision in its Maltese and English versions
seems to have been the most robust predictor of reading in English. This suggests that elision
skills were necessary for reading (Papadopoulos, 2001). When taken holistically, these results
attest to a strong association between sound manipulation skills and reading in Maltese and
English. This specific skill contributes to reading in both languages.
18
English Phoneme Counting and English Syllable Segmentation are related phoneme
and syllable level skills that are brought to bear on the reading process in Maltese and
English, respectively. The fact that English Phoneme Counting predicted word reading in
Maltese attests to its robustness as a predictor of later literacy (Cossu et al., 1988;
Durgunoğlu & Oney, 1999; Harris & Giannouli, 1999; Wimmer et al., 2000). The English
Syllable Segmentation task predicted performance in English reading, and this attests to its
strength as a predictor of later reading development (Hulme et al., 2002; Muter et al., 2004).
Letter-Sound Knowledge in Maltese was the weakest predictor of reading in both languages,
but a significant predictor nevertheless, conforming to Xuereb’s (2009) finding that it helps
Maltese children gain phonological insight in reading.
Overall, considering the results of this study, one would suggest that there is some
evidence of cross-language transfer in the pattern of association of skills sustaining reading
across English and Maltese in a bilingual context. This supports Saiegh-Haddad and Geva’s
(2010) view that “across settings and different language combinations, reading is grounded in
a shared linguistic basis” (p. 266). Manipulation of sounds in words and a thorough
knowledge of the alphabet appear to underlie the skills necessary for reading in both
languages. These results align well with concurrent studies of reading development in
different European languages, paving the way to the suggestion that models of literacy
development, and hence, theories of literacy deficits, may generalise across different
languages (al Mannai & Everatt, 2005, Caravolas et al., 2012, 2013). Although the results are
only tentative and provide far less than a perfect match across the two languages, children
who can manipulate sounds in words, who know their letter-sounds and who show a clear
discriminative phonological ability, read successfully. The bottom line is that in both
languages, the major contributors to reading are in part identical, and in part similar, if to
different degrees.
19
Had this study been conducted on monolinguals in their respective countries, the
results would have provided considerable support for the thesis of this paper. In this present
study, the fact that the children participating in it were balanced users of both languages
resulted in a cross-language effect, meaning that whatever phonological strategies they
developed to decipher words in one language could have been adopted to decipher words in
the other language. One may also argue that this result is due to the use of phonics instruction
in English and in Maltese too, which led the children to develop explicit sensitivity to
phonemes across languages in the first year of schooling (Duncan et al., 2013). The present
study has both theoretical and practical implications. The general findings suggest that some
predictors of reading performance in the bilingual population in this study may be similar,
irrespective of the orthographic depth of the written language. These are relevant to practical
pedagogical issues relating to literacy and support the direct link between phonological
awareness and reading in the two languages. In the first place, phonological awareness
training should focus on the development of skills at the phoneme level (Gillon, 2018).
Secondly, phonemic awareness training should be integrated into children’s learning routines,
irrespective of language (Al-Bataineh & Sims-King, 2013; Yeung et al., 2013).
The study has some limitations. Studies involving larger numbers of participants are
recommended with matched monolingual speakers if one is to explore at greater depth. The
issue of the phonological awareness tasks used not being strictly comparable down to the
phonological unit may prove somewhat more challenging to address. This study does not
examine the weighting of the early contribution of rhyme to English and Maltese reading
development in young bilinguals. By limiting itself to average achieving children, the
possible differential contribution of ability to reading across the two languages in a bilingual
context could not be examined. Selecting bilinguals from one particular school sector is
another limitation of this study, and future studies may consider employing a similar
methodology across the three sectors of the Maltese education system for improved validity
20
and generalisability of results. Ultimately, the present study adds to a small but growing
international body of research such as Caravolas et al., (2012, 2013), Patel et al., (2004),
Vaessen et al., (2010), and Ziegler et al., (2010) that directly compares children learning to
read in two or more alphabetic languages. The critical issue addressed here concerns the
specificity of the phonological skills implicated in English reading development in
comparison to Maltese. The results support the claim that phonological skills show a similar
relation to reading across languages and may indeed transfer between languages. The
predictive relationship between phonological skills and children’s word reading skills in this
study supports both a small language-specific component and a significantly larger common
set of phonological skills driving reading development across the two alphabetic languages.
Share’s (2008) contention that reading science cannot be founded on a single orthography is
to be heeded because such studies are likely to offer a better approximation to the global
norm of reading development.
21
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30
Tables
Table 1.
Participants’ age and literacy raw scores.
Maltese Word
Reading Test
YARC English Word
Reading Test
Males N=51 N=53
Females N=29 N=29
Total N=80 N=82
Mean age in months (SD) 77 (3.6) 77 (3.6)
Mean age in years 6 years 5 months 6 years 5 months
Mean raw score in word reading (SD) 24 (9.8) 16 (6.9)
31
Table 2.
Participants’ raw score on the phonological tests with differences between performance on
the Maltese and English language versions.
Measures of Phonological
Awareness
Maltese
(n=80)
English
(n=82)
Wilcoxon
Signed-Ranks
- Z
Asymptotic
significance
(2-tailed;
p=.05)
raw score (sd) raw score (sd)
Syllable Segmentation
(max. 10)
8.2 (1.8) 7.5 (2.1) -2.771 0.006
Phoneme Counting
(max. 10)
7.9 (2.1) 8.5 (1.8) -2.279 0.023
Elision (max. 20) 7.9 (5.9) 8.8 (5.2) -2.213 0.027
Rhyme Oddity (max. 10) 6.3 (2.3) 6.2 (2.3) -0.01 0.992 ns
Rhyme Generation
(max. 10)
7.8 (5.3) 9.7 (6.1) -3.387 0.001
Phoneme Substitution
(max. 10)
6.7 (2.6) 5.5 (2.6) -3.913 0.001
Letter Sound Knowledge
(max. 10)
8.9 (1.4) 8.7 (1.7) -0.652 0.515 ns
Sound Matching-Initial
(max. 10)
7.4 (2.0) 7.3 (1.9) -0.034 0.973 ns
Sound Matching -Final
(max 10)
6.7 (2.3) 6.5 (2.2) -1.336 0.182 ns
32
Table 3.
Principal Components Analysis: Maltese Phonological Tasks - Oblique rotation with Kaiser
normalisation; rotation converged in 5 iterations.
Measure Principal
component 1
Principal
component 2
Principal
component 3
Maltese Phoneme Counting .823
Maltese Rhyme Oddity .759
Maltese Phoneme Substitution .740
Maltese Rhyme Generation .700
Maltese Elision .614
Maltese Sound Matching Initial .914
Maltese Sound Matching Final .891
Maltese Syllable Segmentation .918
Maltese Letter-Sound
Knowledge .469
33
Table 4.
Principal Components Analysis: English Phonological Tasks - Oblique rotation with Kaiser
normalisation; rotation converged in 6 iterations.
Measure Principal
component 1
Principal
component 2
Principal
component 3
English Rhyme Generation .858
English Phoneme Substitution .830
English Rhyme Oddity .816
English Elision .746
English Sound Matching Initial .854
English Sound Matching Final .805
English Letter-Sound
Knowledge -.423
English Phoneme Counting .792
English Syllable Segmentation .688
34
Table 5.
Zero-order correlations among the Maltese phonological measures
Measures of Maltese
phonological awareness 123456789
1 Syllable Segmentation _
2 Rhyme Oddity -.060 _
3 Rhyme Generation .305 .509** _
4 Phoneme Counting -.003 .337** .344** _
5 Sound Matching Initial -.058 .227* .285* -.048 _
6 Sound Matching Final .002 .231* .248* .030 .739** _
7 Elision .029 .443** .417** .407** .320** .409** _
8 Phoneme Substitution .002 .394** .516** .364** .296** .151 .471** _
9 Letter-Sound Knowledge .081 .162 .162 .124 .133 .140 .256* .244* _
*p<.05, **p<.01, two tailed. n = 80.
35
Table 6.
Zero-order correlations among the English phonological measures
Measures of English
phonological awareness 123456789
1 Syllable Segmentation _
2 Rhyme Oddity .044 _
3 Rhyme Generation -.010 .625** _
4 Phoneme Counting .097 -.003 .155 _
5 Sound Matching Initial .070 .195 .115 .032 _
6 Sound Matching Final .026 .288** .180 0.073 .632** _
7 Elision -.060 .548** .499** .148 .237* .444** _
8 Phoneme Substitution -.016 .516** .654** -.029 .232* .419** .627** _
9 Letter-Sound Knowledge .007 .241 .286** .141 .016 .031 .215 .271* _
*p<.05, **p<.01, two tailed. n = 82.
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