Abstract: This study probes into cross-linguistic transfer of Morphological Awareness (MA) under a special kind of bilingual condition, i.e., Chinese Dialect and Mandarin, with the evidence from Putian-Mandarin diglossia children, who are illiterate in the L1-Putian dialect. The results supported the cross-language transfer of morphological awareness between Putian dialect and Mandarin, but also showed some specificity of the transfer because of the non-literal experience of Putian dialect. Children's compound-structure awareness in Putian dialect is predicative of that in Mandarin and correlates with, but not predictive of Chinese word reading ability. And children's homophone awareness in Putian dialect could significantly predicate Chinese word reading ability, but it is not correlated with the homophone awareness in Mandarin. It suggests that Putian-Mandarin bilingual children's L1 MA is crucial to their L2 MA and the corresponding word reading ability. Even though the dialect user is illiterate in their L1, their L1 metalinguistic awareness could still exerts great influence on the development of L2 metalinguistic awarness and reading ability.