Özet:

This study investigates the phonological awareness of a Turkish monolingual and a TurkishEnglish bilingual child in Turkish. As a case study, the main focus of this study is to explore whether a bilingual advantage exists in phonological processing. Theories of bilingualism and empirical data led to the prediction that the bilingual participant would perform better than the monolingual participant in tasks involving the segmentation of phonemes. With regard to current literature, four phonemic awareness tasks, namely, final phoneme deletion, initial phoneme deletion, phoneme detection, and phoneme substitution tasks were used to find out the levels of phonological awareness of the participants. The tasks were administered individually to each child and correct answers were calculated by percentages. The analysis of the data showed that bilingual child performed better in final phoneme deletion, initial phoneme deletion, phoneme detection tasks, while both children scored the same in the phoneme substitution task. To conclude, this study provided evidence for the positive effect of bilingualism for phonological language processing.

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