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Chinese is often referred to as a single language, but it actually consists of a group of related but different languages. Mandarin is the official national language and also the home language of people living in Beijing and other parts of north China. Cantonese is spoken mainly in the Guangdong province in southeastern China and surrounding areas, including Hong Kong. Cantonese has its origin in ancient Chinese and has a lot of similarities with Mandarin in grammar, phonology, and lexicon. But over the centuries, Cantonese and Mandarin have evolved to be almost mutually unintelligible. Children speaking different Chinese languages attend Mandarin immersion programs as soon as they enter primary school. They learn to speak and read Mandarin in Chinese language class, and they receive instruction in other subjects in Mandarin. The primary purpose of the study was to compare the development of phonological awareness among Cantonese-speaking children in Guangzhou and Mandarin-speaking children in Beijing. Another purpose was to explore the nature of phonological awareness in Chinese. As far as we know, this was the first study of its kind.
Chen et al. (Mon,) studied this question.