On the relationship between phonological awareness, morphological awareness and Chinese literacy skills: evidence from an 8‐year longitudinal study

Abstract

The present study reported data on phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and Chinese literacy skills of 294 children from an 8-year longitudinal study. Results showed that mainland Chinese children's preliterate syllable awareness at ages 4 to 6 years uniquely predicted post-literate morphological awareness at ages 7 to 10 years. Preliterate syllable awareness directly contributed to character reading and writing at age 11 years, while post-literate phonemic awareness predicted only character reading at age 11 years. In addition, preliterate syllable and morphological awareness at ages 4 to 6 years had indirect effects on character reading and writing, reading fluency, and reading comprehension at age 11 years, through post-literate morphological awareness at ages 7 to 10 years. Findings underscore the significant role of syllable awareness in Chinese character reading and writing, and the importance of morphological awareness in character-level processing and high-level literacy skills. More importantly, our results suggest the unique relation of syllable awareness and morphological awareness in Chinese as they focus on the same unit, which is also likely to map directly onto a character, the basic unit for high-level Chinese reading skills.

The Relationship between SES and Reading Comprehension in Chinese: A Mediation Model

“…This path indicated that children from more educated and advantaged parents might have greater vocabulary skills, which would use their understanding of the meaning of the words better to facilitate their morphological awareness (Cheng et al, 2015) and in turn, may lead to high level reading comprehension (Tong et al, 2009; Pan et al, 2016). In other words, vocabulary is a mediator between SES and morphological awareness, and morphological awareness is a mediator between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension.…”

“…Besides, the psychological mechanism by which the effects of SES are manifested in children’s reading comprehension are not well understood. Thus, the purpose of the current study was to explore further the relationship between SES and reading comprehension – focusing on the roles of vocabulary knowledge and morphological awareness, as these appear to have unique influences in Chinese reading development (Song et al, 2015; Pan et al, 2016; Cheng et al, 2017). …”

“…For instance, Cheng et al (2015) found that the initial level of vocabulary knowledge predicted the growth rate of morphological awareness. The two aspects of morphological awareness, homophone awareness and compounding awareness (Liu et al, 2013), make a unique contribution to reading comprehension especially for Chinese children (Tong et al, 2009; McBride, 2016; Pan et al, 2016) given the characteristics of Chinese. Homophone awareness helps children distinguish the morphemes of homophonic characters in learning to read (McBride, 2016).…”

Preschool Phonological and Morphological Awareness As Longitudinal Predictors of Early Reading and Spelling Development in Greek

“…On the other hand, morphological awareness plays a fundamental role in mastering decoding, reading fluency, and comprehension (Deacon and Kirby, 2004; Kuo and Anderson, 2006; Tong et al, 2011; Kirby et al, 2012; Deacon et al, 2014; Muroya et al, 2017) and orthographic spelling (Deacon and Kirby, 2004; Deacon and Bryant, 2005, 2006; Desrochers et al, 2017) across orthographies (Wei et al, 2014; Rothou and Padeliadu, 2015; Grigorakis and Manolitsis, 2016; Pan et al, 2016; Vaknin-Nusbaum et al, 2016a,b; Muroya et al, 2017). Morphological awareness refers to (a) an explicit understanding of morphological relations between word forms and meanings, such as grammatical inflection and productive derivation, and (b) the ability to manipulate the morphological structure of words (Carlisle, 1995).…”

“…More recently, using latent variable modeling in Chinese, Pan et al (2016) found that pre-literate syllable and morphological awareness predicted character reading, reading fluency, reading comprehension, and writing at the age of 11 years, beyond any effects of phonological awareness, but only indirectly, that is, through post-literate morphological awareness assessed at the ages of 7–10 years.…”