Browsing by Author "Tikkanen, Minea"

Aim of the study. Multilingualism is globally more common than monolingualism and especially sequential multilingualism is increasing also in Finland. Reading is essential skill in our society, and it is a way to fully participate in information society. According to previous research, learning to read while also acquiring more than one language may differ from monolingual reading acquisition. The purpose of this study is to add knowledge about early reading of sequentially multilingual children and compare it to monolingual peers. This study aims to answer to the question if early reading of multilingual children differs from early reading of monolingual children at the age of 6 to 7. Additionally, the aim is to investigate the relations between early reading and linguistic factors and background factors. Methods. Participants of the study were multilingual pre-schoolers and first graders (n = 38) and monolingual pre-schoolers and first graders (n = 37). Reading tasks were letter-knowledge, rapid automatized naming, phonological awareness, pseudoword repetition and syllable reading. Linguistic factors were speech comprehension and verbal fluency and background factors time of exposure to Finnish language, parental education, and familial risk for reading difficulty. Mann-Whitney’s U-test was used to statistically analyse group differences. The relations between early reading and linguistic factors and background factors were investigated with Spearman’s rank correlation coefficients. Results and discussion. Multilingual children performed poorer than monolingual children in letter-knowledge and phonological awareness in all the participants and pre-schoolers. In first grade multilingual children performed poorer to monolingual children only in pseudoword repetition. There were statistically significant relations between speech comprehension and letter-knowledge, and speech comprehension and phonological awareness. A relation was found also between verbal fluency and rapid automized naming. The relations were slightly different in monolingual and multilingual children. There were barely any statistically significant relations between early reading and background factors. These results are in line with the view that multilingual early reading is different than monolingual, but multilingual children perform quite well considering their language proficiency in Finnish. The gap in reading skills between monolingual and multilingual children also narrows from pre-school to first grade.