speech and reading

i once read a paper the authors of which argue for an association between sensitivity to Chinese tones and English reading, with some good evidence of course. these are Chinese bililngual children residing in the US (or Canada?). one would immediately ask why. why would a child's listening to Chinese tones bear on her reading in another language? consider the following possibilities:

1. tone awareness to a certain extent indicates one's general sensitivity to speech sounds; such a sensitivity is so general that it covers whatever languages in the child's head. so a child with good general speech sensitivity probably is also good at identifying English sounds, which supports good English reading.

2. tone awareness to a certain extent indicates how generally smart one is. a clever child thus scores better on both Chinese tone awareness and English reading than a stupid child, who flunks both. hence the correlation.

3. the ability to listen to tones, which is a skill acquired in the child's learning of Chinese, gets transferred and is subsequently used in the bilingual child's learning of English reading. a child with good tone awareness reads English better because she has more first language resources to transfer and use.

4. the data were not properly obtained and processed.

you may want to dismiss explanation 4 right away, for it says nothing about science (but a great deal about ethics). accounts 1 and 3 are very similar; they are based upon the thinking that learning one language facilitates the learning of another no matter how dissimilar the languages in question are. account 2 pushes the idea further: learning anything facilitates the further learning of anything else.

to me these interpretations are most uninteresting. if anyone of them turns out to be correct the whole research would effectively be a waste of time. if you can think of better ones, let me know.