Multiple Pathways by Which Compounding Morphological Awareness Is Related to Reading Comprehension: Evidence From Chinese Second Graders

Abstract

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.

Mechanisms by which morphological awareness contributes to Chinese and English reading comprehension

“…*p < .05; **p < .01. Kim et al, 2019). The results here support that morphology, as a part of linguistic systems, has direct effects on reading comprehension by having impact on the reading comprehension process generally.…”

“…In English, the direct relations concur with previous findings from studies conducted with English‐speaking children (e.g., Deacon et al, 2014; Levesque et al, 2017) and Spanish‐speaking English language‐learning children (Kieffer & Lesaux, 2012) and extend this finding to Chinese ESL learners. In Chinese, this finding adds to a small, but growing, body of studies concluding that morphological awareness exerts unique, direct effects on reading comprehension beyond the influence of mediators and control variables (e.g., Kim et al, 2019). The results here support that morphology, as a part of linguistic systems, has direct effects on reading comprehension by having impact on the reading comprehension process generally.…”

“…Theoretically, morphological awareness integrates semantic, phonological and syntactic information, a similar integrative process as in real‐time comprehension processing (Kuo & Anderson, 2006). Empirically, morphological awareness has been found to have unique direct effects on reading comprehension in English (e.g., Deacon et al, 2014; Levesque, Kieffer, & Deacon, 2017) and in Chinese (e.g., Kim, Guo, Liu, Peng, & Yang, 2019), after controlling multiple variables.…”

Toward Integrative Reading Science: The Direct and Indirect Effects Model of Reading

“…Another example is morphological awareness as it makes a contribution to reading comprehension via multiple pathways (e.g., via word reading → text reading fluency → reading comprehension; via vocabulary and grammatical knowledge → higher order cognitions and regulation → listening comprehension → text reading fluency → reading comprehension). Growing evidence indicates that not all component skills make direct contributions, but instead make direct and/or indirect contributions to reading comprehension (Ahmed et al, 2016; Cromley & Azevedo, 2007; Kieffer et al, 2013; Kim, 2015b; Kim, Guo, et al, 2020; Vellutino et al, 2007).…”

Morphological analysis skill and academic vocabulary knowledge are malleable through intervention and may contribute to reading comprehension for multilingual adolescents

“…Following Nagy et al (2014), we define morphological analysis as the use of explicit knowledge about morphemes to infer meanings of new morphologically complex words that contain learned morphemes. It is possible that learners employ morphological analysis without conscious attention to analysing morphological constituents (Kim et al 2019; Nagy 2007), but some of this effort may be carried out deliberately and explicitly. For instance, a learner may seek familiar morphological constituents to infer meaning of unfamiliar words when reading.…”