The relationship between linguistic experience and phonemic representations in spelling was investigated in two groups of Mandarin-English bilingual children (aged 5-6 years) who spoke mostly Mandarin-L1 (n = 23) or mostly English-L1 (n = 27) at home. A 60-item cloze task including high- and low-frequency words with word-initial and word-final target phonemes that are either common to Mandarin and English (/f/ and /p/), or found only in English (/v/ and /b/), was developed and administered to both groups. With performance for a neutral control phoneme /m/ matched, spelling accuracy for the common phonemes was equivalent but the Mandarin-L1 children's performance for /v/ and /b/ was significantly poorer than that of their English-L1 classmates in low-frequency words. For both groups, performance on word-final targets was poorer for English-only phonemes than common phonemes. If early literacy development depends on stored phonological representations of the first language, these findings have implications for language minority communities. (Contains 2 tables.)