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

Abstract

Background: This study examined the developmental relationship between Chinese children's compounding awareness and vocabulary knowledge following a 4-year longitudinal design. Methods: A test battery that included measures of vocabulary knowledge, compounding awareness, nonverbal IQ, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, orthographic awareness and word reading was administered to 142 Chinese-speaking students in Grade 3 (T1). In addition, vocabulary knowledge and compounding awareness were followed in Grades 4 (T2) and 6 (T3). Results: Controlling for nonverbal IQ, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, orthographic awareness and word reading at the initial level, the structural equation modeling results showed that children's compounding awareness made a significant direct contribution to vocabulary knowledge from T1 to T2.

Cognitive-linguistic skills and vocabulary knowledge breadth and depth in children’s L1 Chinese and L2 English

“…Cognitive-linguistic skills and vocabulary depth in L1 Chinese and L2 English Vocabulary knowledge depth, as measured with tasks of oral definition, was significantly correlated with other cognitive-linguistic skills in Chinese and English in previous studies (e.g., Choi et al, 2019;McBride-Chang et al, 2005aPan et al, 2011;Tong et al, 2018;Xie et al, 2020). Vocabulary knowledge depth involves using various linguistic structures to express accurate information, represent the core meanings of linguistic items, and thus explain or define words (Benelli et al, 2006).…”

“…Phonological awareness has been shown to be associated with vocabulary knowledge depth in several previous studies on Chinese children's L1 Chinese and their L2 English (e.g., Choi et al, 2019;McBride-Chang et al, 2008;Pan et al, 2011;Song et al, 2015). In addition, the importance of morphemes for vocabulary learning has been highlighted in previous work in both Chinese (McBride-Chang et al, 2008;Xie et al, 2020) and English (Nagy & Anderson, 1984;Sparks & Deacon, 2015). Morphological awareness was uniquely associated with vocabulary knowledge depth in Hong Kong children's L1 Chinese and L2 English (e.g., Tong et al, 2017Tong et al, , 2018.…”

“…Moreover, RAN, the ability to access the names of highly familiar stimuli such as digits, letters, colors, and objects (Denckla & Rudel, 1976), has been shown to be significantly associated with expressive vocabulary knowledge in both Chinese and English in some studies (e.g., McBride-Chang, et al, 2005b;Pan et al, 2011;Xie et al, 2020). RAN typically involves speeded retrieval of phonological representations from long-term memory and fluency of access to the lexicon (Wagner & Torgesen, 1987).…”

Unpacking the relation between morphological awareness and reading comprehension in Chinese children

“…The compound production task (Liu & McBride‐Chang, 2010) consisted of 8 practice items and 20 test items. This task has been widely used to assess compounding awareness in Chinese middle‐ and upper‐grades (Liu & Liu, 2020; Xie et al, 2020). In this task, questions/scenarios were presented to children orally, and they were asked to produce new words based on the key information contained in the question/scenario.…”

“…The vocabulary definition task (Song et al, 2015) consisted of one practice item and 32 test items arranged in increasing difficulty, and was used to evaluate children's vocabulary knowledge. This task was administered in grades 3, 4, and 5, and has been chosen to assess vocabulary knowledge of Chinese middle‐ and upper‐graders in previous studies (Song et al, 2015; Xie et al, 2020). The experimenter verbally presented the vocabulary, and then the children were asked to explain the meaning of the vocabulary.…”