Morphological awareness predicts the growth rate of Chinese character reading

Abstract

In this longitudinal study, we assessed 88 Hong Kong Chinese typically developing kindergarteners' Chinese character reading accuracy four times with 6-month intervals over 1.5 years with the first testing point in the fall of the second year of kindergarten (K2), during which morphological awareness, phonological awareness, orthographic awareness, visual-spatial relationships, and nonverbal IQ were tested (Time 1). The latent growth curve modeling showed that reading development in Chinese of typically developing kindergarteners followed a cumulative linear trajectory, suggesting that children with higher initial reading ability develop reading ability at a faster rate. Additionally, morphological awareness at K2 positively and uniquely predicted a linear growth pattern of character reading between K2 and K3 over years, a period in which formal teaching and learning Chinese takes place in HongKong. Contributing to the literature, these findings highlighted the unique significance of morphological awareness in the growth rate of reading: Typically developing children with better early morphological awareness tend to have a higher initial point of reading ability and, more importantly, a faster growth rate, resulting in a wider discrepancy of developmental outcomes between low-and high-performers. The results suggest that greater attention should be focused on the development of morphological awareness in early readers, given its salient role in Chinese reading development.

Pathways to word reading and calculation skills in young Chinese children: From biologically primary skills to biologically secondary skills.

“…Together with previous studies of Chinese word reading (So & Siegel, 1997; Wang et al, 2015; Wei et al, 2014), the finding further lends support to the universal account of word reading—that the word reading process involves universal aspects of language including semantics, orthography, and phonology (Frost, 2012). However, we did not find the unique role of MA in word reading that has been demonstrated in many previous studies (Lin et al, 2019; McBride-Chang et al, 2003). This may be because MA taps into the awareness of syntactic rules within Chinese words and hence is more involved in text and compound word reading (Wang & McBride-Chang, 2016).…”

Is the Science of Reading Just the Science of Reading English?

“…Other likely casualties of the century‐long Anglophone obsession with (oral) word‐reading accuracy include the study of meaning (i.e., morphology, morphological awareness), which has only begun receiving the research attention it deserves over the past decade or so (e.g., Berthiaume, Daigle, & Desrochers, 2018; Bowers & Bowers, 2017; Duncan, 2018; Goodwin & Ahn, 2013; Harm & Seidenberg, 2004; Ke, Miller, Zhang, & Koda, 2021; Kirby & Bowers, 2017; Kuo & Anderson, 2006; Levesque, Breadmore, & Deacon, 2021; Lin, Sun, & McBride, 2019; Rastle, 2018; Verhoeven & Perfetti, 2011). Oral reading accuracy, furthermore, also emphasizes phonological processes more so than silent (word) reading at the expense of orthography and morphology (for a discussion, see Share, 2008).…”

Morphological awareness and its role in early word reading in English monolinguals, Spanish-English, and Chinese-English simultaneous bilinguals

“…In Chinese, over 90% of words are lexical compounds, such as snow+man. Greater Chinese compound awareness in kindergarten is associated with better single word/character reading, and steeper growth trajectories in reading over time (Lin et al, 2019). In contrast to Chinese, Spanish predominantly uses derivational affixes to create multimorphemic words such as person+al+ity (personalidad).…”