Development of phonological awareness in English-Mandarin bilinguals: A comparison of English-L1 and Mandarin-L1 kindergarten children

► Phonological awareness is critical for literacy development. ► Sparse research on development of phonological awareness in bilinguals. ► Mandarin and English have very different phonological structures. ► Report pre-readers syllable and phoneme awareness in both languages. ► Mandarin-L1 children's phoneme awareness depends on exposure to English.