Development of Mandarin onset-rime detection in relation to age and Pinyin instruction

Abstract

Development of explicit phonological awareness (PA) is thought to be dependent on formal instruction in reading or spelling. However, the development of implicit PA emerges before literacy instruction and interacts with how the phonological representations are constructed within a certain language. The present study systematically investigated the development of implicit PA of Mandarin onset-rime detection in relation to age and Pinyin instruction, involving 70 four-to seven-year-old kindergarten and first-grade children. Results indicated that the overall rate of correct responses in the rime detection task was much higher than that in the onset detection one, with better discrimination ability of larger units. Moreover, the underlying factors facilitating the development of Mandarin onset and rime detection were different, although both correlated positively with Pinyin instruction. On one hand, with age, development of rime detection appeared to develop naturally through spoken language experience before schooling, and was further optimized to the best after Pinyin instruction. On the other hand, the accuracy of onset detection exhibited a drastic improvement, boosting from 66% among preschoolers to 93% among first graders, establishing the primacy of Pinyin instruction responsible for the development of implicit onset awareness in Mandarin.