A longitudinal investigation of syntactic awareness and reading comprehension in Chinese-English bilingual children

In a two-year longitudinal study we examined if and how syntactic awareness in L1 Chinese influenced reading comprehension in L2 English, a typologically different script. Participants were 401 Chinese-English bilingual children from Hong Kong. We assessed their word order, morphosyntactic, and reading comprehension skills in L1 Chinese and L2 English, and retested them after one year. Results showed that L1 syntactic awareness...