The development of young Chinese children's morphological awareness: The role of semantic relatedness and morpheme type

Abstract

The research reported in this paper investigated the effects of semantic relatedness of words (closely related vs. distantly related) and morpheme type (free morpheme vs. bound morpheme) on young Chinese children's homophone awareness, an aspect of morphological awareness, in two experiments. The first experiment was a cross-sectional study including 39 children in a beginning kindergarten class, 39 children in an intermediate kindergarten class, and 36 children in a senior kindergarten class. The second experiment was a 7-month longitudinal study involving 43 first graders and 50 second graders at the beginning of the study. In both experiments, the children judged whether orally presented words shared the same morpheme or contained homophonous morphemes. The results suggest that homophone awareness emerges in Chinese children in the kindergarten years. Children's morpheme identification is facilitated by the semantic proximity of words that share a morpheme, and awareness of free morphemes is developed before that of bound morphemes. Furthermore, although semantic relatedness is the most prominent factor in kindergarten, its effect varies as a function of morpheme type in the early primary grades. Our research sheds light on the developmental course of morphological awareness and the factors that influence it.Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in language. In all languages, morphemes are combined in a rule-based manner to form morphologically complex

Text comprehension mediates morphological awareness, syntactic processing, and working memory in predicting Chinese written composition performance.

“…Finding morphological awareness to be an important predictor of Chinese written composition is consistent with previous studies that suggest it is related to learning to read in Chinese (Hao et al, 2013; Kuo & Andersno, 2006; Liu & McBride-Chang, 2010; Packard et al, 2006; Shu et al, 2006; Zhang et al, 2012) and predicts Chinese writing ability (Leong & Ho, 2008; Leong et al, 2013). Finding working memory to be an important predictor of Chinese written composition is consistent with results of previous research that has focused primarily on working memory in monolingual Chinese- and English-speaking children (Chung & McBride-Chang, 2011; Kellogg, 2001, 2004).…”

“…Because the Chinese language includes many homophones, morphological awareness is of particular importance to Chinese reading and writing (Hao, Chen, Dronjic, Shu, & Anderson, 2013; Kuo & Andersno, 2006; Liu & McBride-Chang, 2010; Packard et al, 2006; Shu et al, 2006; Zhang et al, 2012). Chinese morphology is predominantly that of morphological compounding.…”

“…Chinese children have been shown to have a better developed sense of compounding than their American counterparts (Zhang et al, 2012). Semantic relatedness and types of morphemes in Chinese play different roles at different stages of reading literacy development in Chinese children (Hao et al, 2013). More proficient Chinese language users, compared with less proficient ones, have been shown to generate more two-character compound words from left-headed or right-headed base forms (Leong & Ho, 2008).…”

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

“…Children become aware of morphological structure in the preschool years (Carlisle, 1995; Hao, Chen, Dronjic, Shu & Anderson, 2013), and this awareness significantly increases with the onset of literacy and formal education. Morphological awareness emerges gradually; the ability to identify morphemes in a word develops before the ability to reflect on the meanings of morphemes, while the ability to comment on the grammatical implications and distributional properties of morphemes emerges even later, if at all (Carlisle & Fleming, 2003; Tyler & Nagy, 1989).…”

Bidirectional longitudinal relationship between Chinese children's compounding awareness and vocabulary knowledge from Grades 3 to 6

“…Several control variables including orthographic awareness, word reading, IQ, rapid automatized naming and phonological awareness have been associated with children's compounding awareness and vocabulary knowledge (Coltheart et al, 2001; Hao et al, 2013; Plaut et al1996). In these studies, the influence of orthographic awareness, word reading, IQ, rapid automatized naming and phonological awareness on compounding awareness and vocabulary knowledge was controlled in structural equation models (SEMs).…”