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Morphological awareness as a function of semantics, phonology, and orthography and as a predictor of reading comprehension in Chinese*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2016

HONG LI ,
VEDRAN DRONJIC ,
XI CHEN ,
YIXUN LI ,
YAHUA CHENG  and
XINCHUN WU
HONG LI*
Affiliation:
Beijing Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, School of Psychology, Beijing Normal University
VEDRAN DRONJIC
Affiliation:
Department of English, Northern Arizona University
XI CHEN
Affiliation:
Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development, University of Toronto
YIXUN LI
Affiliation:
Beijing Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, School of Psychology, Beijing Normal University
YAHUA CHENG
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Ningbo University
XINCHUN WU*
Affiliation:
Beijing Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, School of Psychology, Beijing Normal University
*
[*]Addresses for correspondence: Hong Li, Beijing Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, School of Psychology, Beijing Normal University. E-mail: [email protected]; Xinchun Wu, Beijing Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, School of Psychology, Beijing Normal University. e-mail: [email protected]
[*]Addresses for correspondence: Hong Li, Beijing Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, School of Psychology, Beijing Normal University. E-mail: [email protected]; Xinchun Wu, Beijing Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, School of Psychology, Beijing Normal University. e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This study investigates the contributions of semantic, phonological, and orthographic factors to morphological awareness of 413 Chinese-speaking students in Grades 2, 4, and 6, and its relationship with reading comprehension. Participants were orally presented with pairs of bimorphemic compounds and asked to judge whether the first morphemes of the words shared a meaning. Morpheme identity (same or different), whole-word semantic relatedness (high or low), orthography (same or different), and phonology (same or different) were manipulated. By Grade 6, children were able to focus on meaning similarities across morphemes while ignoring the distraction of form, but they remained influenced by whole-word semantic relatedness. Children's ability to overcome the distraction of phonology consistently improved with age, but did not reach ceiling, whereas the parallel ability for orthography reached ceiling at Grade 6. Morphological judgment performance was a significant unique predictor of reading comprehension when character naming and vocabulary knowledge were accounted for.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 44 , Issue 5 , September 2017 , pp. 1218 - 1247
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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