Auditory sensitivity, speech perception, L1 Chinese, and L2 English reading abilities in Hong Kong Chinese children

A 4-stage developmental model, in which auditory sensitivity is fully mediated by speech perception at both the segmental and suprasegmental levels, which are further related to word reading through their associations with phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, verbal short-term memory and morphological awareness, was tested with concurrently collected data on 153 2nd- and 3rd-grade Hong Kong Chinese children. Nested model comparisons were conducted to test this model separately against alternatives in relation to both Chinese and English word reading using structural equation modeling. For Chinese word reading, the proposed 4-stage model was demonstrated to be the best model. Auditory sensitivity was associated with speech perception, which was related to Chinese word reading mainly through its relations to morphological awareness and rapid automatized naming. In contrast, for English word reading, the best model required an additional direct path from suprasegmental sensitivity (in Chinese) to English word reading. That is, in addition to phonological awareness, Chinese speech prosody was also directly associated with English word recognition.