Narrative skills of Chinese-English bilingual children: age-related patterns and cross-linguistic associations with phonological awareness

Narrative competence is vital for children’s language and cognitive development. Nevertheless, few studies have focused on Chinese-English bilingual children, and even fewer have examined how phonological awareness (PA) is associated with their narrative skills. Using a battery of parallel phonological and narrative tasks in both Chinese and English, this quantitative study examined age-related patterns in narrative skills and their relationship with phonological awareness (PA) in a cross-sectional sample of 106 Chinese-English bilingual children aged three to six. The results indicate age-related increases in children’s narrative skills in both Chinese and English, although the patterns differed across the two languages. Additionally, PA demonstrated significant associations with narrative skills in both languages, including cross-linguistic associations across Chinese and English measures. Specifically, English syllable segmentation and Chinese narrative skills significantly predicted English narrative performance. Meanwhile, Chinese non-word repetition, phoneme segmentation, rhyming discrimination, and English narrative skills predicted Chinese narrative performance. These findings suggest that phonological awareness (PA) is closely associated with bilingual children’s narrative skills, with significant cross-linguistic associations between Chinese and English measures. The study has valuable implications for language teaching and bilingual education, underscoring the importance of fostering PA in early childhood to support narrative development across languages.