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Morphological awareness in Chinese: Unique associations of homophone awareness and lexical compounding to word reading and vocabulary knowledge in Chinese children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2012

PHIL D. LIU ,
CATHERINE MCBRIDE-CHANG ,
TERRY T.-Y. WONG ,
HUA SHU  and
ANITA M.-Y. WONG
PHIL D. LIU
Affiliation:
Hong Kong Institute of Education
CATHERINE MCBRIDE-CHANG*
Affiliation:
Chinese University of Hong Kong
TERRY T.-Y. WONG
Affiliation:
University of Hong Kong
HUA SHU
Affiliation:
Beijing Normal University
ANITA M.-Y. WONG
Affiliation:
University of Hong Kong
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Catherine McBride-Chang, Department of Psychology, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T.Hong Kong. E-mail: cmcbride@psy.cuhk.edu.hk
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Abstract

An in-depth exploration of the associations of two aspects of morphological awareness in Chinese—homophone awareness and lexical compounding awareness—to Chinese word reading and vocabulary knowledge was the primary focus of the present study. Among 154 9-year-old Hong Kong Chinese children, both lexical compounding and homophone awareness were significantly associated with word reading (r = .54 for compounding, r = .38 for homophones) and vocabulary knowledge (r = .41 for compounding, r = .53 for homophones). However, with autoregressors additionally statistically controlled, homophone awareness remained uniquely associated with vocabulary but not word reading; lexical compounding was uniquely associated with both word reading and vocabulary. Path analyses best illustrated this pattern. Both morphological awareness constructs are likely bidirectionally associated with word reading and vocabulary knowledge. However, homophone awareness is more centrally associated with vocabulary knowledge because it taps specific, existing morpheme knowledge. In contrast, lexical compounding requires structural understanding of one's language, which seems to be helpful for both learning to read and vocabulary acquisition in Chinese.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 34 , Issue 4 , July 2013 , pp. 755 - 775
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

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