Morphological awareness, or the knowledge and awareness of morphemes and morphological structures in a language, has been shown to be important to reading. The authors investigated multiple pathways by which compounding morphological awareness is related to reading comprehension: indirect pathways via vocabulary, word reading, and listening comprehension, as well as a direct relation. This question was addressed using data from 325 Chinese (Mandarin)‐speaking second graders. The authors tested alternative structural equation models that compared variations of direct and indirect relations. Results revealed that the two predictors according to the simple view of reading, word reading and listening comprehension, explained 80% of the variance in reading comprehension. Importantly, compounding morphological awareness was directly related to reading comprehension, as well as indirectly via vocabulary, word reading, and listening comprehension. Together, they explained 87% of the total variance in reading comprehension. Moreover, the total effect of compounding morphological awareness on reading comprehension, after accounting for the direct effect (0.18) and indirect effects (0.32) via multiple pathways, was substantial (0.49 standardized regression weight). These results add to growing evidence on the important role of morphological awareness in reading comprehension and highlight the multiple ways that morphological awareness makes a contribution to reading comprehension in Chinese.

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The traditional data envelopment analysis (DEA), bootstrap-DEA and Malmquist models are employed to measure different tourism efficiencies and their spatial characteristics of 61 cities in six coastal urban agglomerations in eastern China. The following conclusions are drawn. (1) The comprehensive efficiency (CE) of urban tourism using the bootstrap-DEA model is lower than the CE level using the DEA-CRS model, which confirms the significant tendency of the DEA-CRS model to overestimate results. (2) The geometric CE averages of urban tourism in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) and the Pearl River Delta (PRD) have changed from ineffective to effective since 2000, the averages in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) and the Shandong Peninsula (SDP) have changed from ineffective to moderately effective since 2000, and those in the Central and Southern Liaoning (CSL) and the West Bank of Taiwan Strait (WBTS) have been ineffective since 2000. (3) The CE values of urban tourism in the PRD, the YRD, the BTH and the SDP have been slightly affected by the pure technical efficiency (PTE), whereas the CE values in the CSL and the WBTS have been slightly affected by the scale efficiency (SE) since 2000. (4) Spatially, the range of geometric averages of the total factor productivity (TFP) for the PRD, the YRD, the BTH, the SDP, the WBTS and the CSL has decreased sequentially, while the one for most cities in six urban agglomerations has exhibited a downward trend since 2000. (5) Collectively, the natural conditions, the economic policies and the tourism capital drive the SE change of urban tourism of the CSL and the WBTS. The tourism enterprises for increasing returns to scale and imitating innovative technology have an effect on the CE change of urban tourism in the BTH and the SDP. The tourism market competition drives the PTE change of urban tourism in the PRD and the YRD. Although the PTE and the SE of urban tourism in six coastal urban agglomerations suffer from uncertain events, the CE maintained overall sound momentum since 2000.

a b s t r a c tIn this paper we consider a single-machine scheduling problem with the effects of learning and deterioration. In this model, job processing times are defined by functions of their starting times and positions in the sequence. The problem is to determine an optimal combination of the due-date and schedule so as to minimize the sum of earliness, tardiness and due-date. We show that the problem remains polynomially solvable under the proposed model.