Reading and vocabulary knowledge in English–Meetei Mayek biliterates: a registered report

Abstract The objective of the current study was to examine the association between word reading and vocabulary knowledge in English and Meetei Mayek in a registered report format. Three hundred and eighty-one Grade 3 children (female = 193, mean age = 10 years) attending schools in Manipur (India) participated in the study. They were tested in a cross-sectional design using standardized English reading measures and their adapted versions in Meetei Mayek. The relationships among measures of word reading and vocabulary knowledge in English and Meetei Mayek were examined to test the linguistic interdependence hypothesis of English contributing to Meetei Mayek word reading and vocabulary knowledge. Posterior distribution checks showed that significant differences in correlations were observed for three out of nine comparisons between the relevant measures of the two languages. Regression analyses indicated that cross-linguistic transfer was evident for word reading and uncertain for vocabulary knowledge. The findings suggest that the cross-language transfer effect may not account for children whose reading acquisition in their second language precedes their reading acquisition in their first or societal language. All data and code were made available on: https://osf.io/73eyv/.