Contributions of executive processing to reading comprehension: bilinguals in Hong Kong

Abstract

Although the relation between executive process and reading comprehension is well-supported by bilinguals with languages all over the world, it may not be the case in Chinese especially for bilinguals in Hong Kong. In addition, cross language transfers were argued to appear in first language (L1) and second language (L2) linguistically similar to each other. With linguistically different orthography and phonology between Chinese and English, current study addressed two questions: 1, how executive process within the system of working memory contributes to performance of reading comprehension; 2, the possibility of cross language transfer between working memory and reading comprehension. To in-depth analyze the effect of working memory to reading comprehension, a measure of suppressing ability was further conducted. The studies recruited 46 adult bilinguals in Hong Kong and achieved following findings: 1, L2 working memory significantly predicts L1 reading comprehension; 2, L1 working memory is able to predict general performance of irrelevance suppression in both L1 and L2. Current exploratory findings support verbally shared nature of working memory across languages and demonstrate cross language transfer among adult bilinguals in Hong Kong, possessing highly different L1 and L2.