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This study evaluates the extent to which syntactic awareness contributes to reading comprehension in English-French bilinguals, considering both the potential for a direct relation, as well as an indirect one, through word reading. Participants were 146 first-grade students enrolled in early French immersion programs in Canada. While the children received all school instruction in French, English was their stronger language and the language of the broader community. Given this dual language context, we examined relations from syntactic awareness in each of English and French to children's French reading comprehension. Path analyses showed that within French, the language of school instruction, syntactic awareness contributed to reading comprehension indirectly through word reading. The findings suggest that novice readers rely more heavily on basic reading skills, such as word reading, to comprehend texts and syntactic awareness facilitates reading comprehension through word reading. Across the two languages, English syntactic awareness contributed both directly to French reading comprehension and indirectly through French word reading. The cross-language findings suggest that English syntactic awareness is related to French to support French reading comprehension. These findings help fill in a developmental picture in early bilinguals, particularly given studies of older, more skilled monolingual readers showing evidence for solely a direct relation between syntactic awareness and reading comprehension.

Much of what we know about the development of listeners' word segmentation strategies originates from the artificial language-learning literature. However, many artificial speech streams designed to study word segmentation lack a salient cue found in all natural languages: utterance boundaries. In this study, participants listened to a speech-stream containing one of three sets of word boundary cues: transitional probabilities between syllables (TP Condition), silences marking utterance boundaries (UB Condition), or a combination of both cues (TP + UB Condition). Recognition of the trained words and rule words (words not in language, but conforming to its phonotactic structure) was tested. Participants performed equally well in the TP + UB and UB Conditions, scoring above chance on both trained and rule words. Performance in the TP condition, however, was at chance. Our results suggest that attention to UBs is a particularly effective strategy for finding words in speech, possibly providing a language-general solution to the word segmentation problem.