Morphological Awareness in Vocabulary Acquisition Among Chinese‐Speaking Children: Testing Partial Mediation via Lexical Inference Ability

Abstract

The goal of this study was to investigate the effect of Chinese‐specific morphological awareness on vocabulary acquisition among young Chinese‐speaking students. The participants were 288 Chinese‐speaking second graders from three different cities in China. Multiple regression analysis and mediation analysis were used to uncover the mediated and unmediated effects of morphological awareness on reading vocabulary knowledge. Results showed that both morphological awareness and lexical inference ability significantly contributed to reading vocabulary knowledge after each factor was controlled for. The ability to extract sublexical morphological information (in the form of derivational awareness and compound awareness) significantly predicted the students' reading vocabulary. More importantly, the study revealed that morphological awareness made a significant indirect contribution to reading vocabulary via lexical inference ability. Findings suggest that morphological awareness enhances young Chinese students' reading vocabulary acquisition by the partial mediation of their lexical inference ability.

Multi-Faceted Morphological Awareness and Vocabulary Knowledge in English as a Second Language Learners: A Multivariate Analysis

“…However, compound awareness was not found to have a signifi cant eff ect on English vocabulary depth. Recent studies confi rmed that cross-linguistic compound awareness in both Chinese and English significantly contributed to Chinese vocabulary knowledge (e.g., Chen et al, 2009;Liu & McBride-Chang, 2010;Pasquarella, Chen, Lam, Luo, & Ramirez, 2011;Zhang, 2015) and cross-linguistic derivational awareness was found to significantly predict English vocabulary development (Kieffer & Lesaux, 2012;Zhang, 2013). The current study also justified that there were cross-linguistic variations of morphological awareness in vocabulary development, and English compound awareness was a weaker predictor of ESL vocabulary knowledge compared with English derivational awareness.…”

“…In this sense, sensitivity to morpheme knowledge is crucial to meaning construction in vocabulary learning. Many studies have found the positive relationship between morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge among monolingual speakers of different language backgrounds (e.g., Chen, Hao, Geva, Zhu, & Shu, 2009;Ku & Anderson, 2003;Liu & McBride-Chang, 2010;McBride-Chang, Wagner, Muse, Chow, & Shu, 2005;Zhang, 2015).…”

Inferring Meaning From Meaningful Parts: The Contributions of Morphological Skills to the Development of Children's Reading Comprehension

“…There is a growing consensus that they are indeed distinguishable skills. For instance, several cross‐sectional studies have shown morphological awareness and morphological analysis to be positively correlated in children and adults but not redundantly or overly correlated, as would be expected if multicollinearity was an issue (e.g., Deacon et al., ; D. Zhang & Koda, ; H. Zhang, ). Confirmatory factor analysis has also demonstrated that morphological awareness and morphological analysis are best represented as separate constructs rather than a single morphology construct for students in grades 3 (Levesque et al., ), 7, and 8 (Goodwin et al., ).…”

“…Although morphological analysis can be applied strategically to understand words, we view it as a form of online, tacit morphological processing (see Goodwin, Petscher, Carlisle, & Mitchell, ). In research, this construct is most often measured by asking students to choose or produce definitions for multimorphemic words (e.g., McCutchen & Logan, ; Pacheco & Goodwin, ; H. Zhang, ). Critically, the distinction between these morphological constructs has not always been clear in empirical research (e.g., Carlisle & Fleming, ; McBride‐Chang, Wagner, Muse, Chow, & Shu, ).…”

Morphological Intervention in Promoting Higher-Order Reading Abilities among College-Level Second Language Learners

“…Reading acquisition is a very complex process because it necessitates fundamental semantic meaning activation at both the local word level and the global text level [4]. Reading researchers have shown that word learning and reading development benefit from a wide variety of cognitive and linguistic abilities (e.g., working memory, metacognitive strategies, word reading, lexical inference) [5,6]. The existing literature has extensively focused on the correlation between various indicators and reading outcomes, which lack an in-depth understanding of how various factors can contribute to actual instruction and learning.…”