Relations between awareness of morphosyntactic structures in Chinese compound words and reading abilities: A short report

ABSTRACT

This is a short report of the investigation of the relationship between awareness of morphosyntactic structures in Chinese compound words and reading abilities on 268 fourth graders studying in three mainstream schools in Shenzhen. All children were assessed using reading and cognitive tasks including rapid automatized naming, phonological, orthographic and morphological awareness. A compound production task using pseudo compound words with different morphosyntactic structures in the first and second levels as stimuli was also conducted. Results of ANOVA indicated that main effect of first level morphosyntactic structures, main effect of second level morphosyntactic structures and interaction effects between the two were significant. Children’s awareness of different morphosyntactic structures were affected by frequency of usage of individual morphosyntactic structures in the language. Results of hierarchical regression analyses revealed that the awareness of morphosyntactic structures in Chinese compound words is strongly associated with Chinese reading abilities. Theoretical and clinical implications were discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese
• morphological awareness
• morphosyntax
• reading

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Notes

¹ The frequency of occurrence of the Chinese characters used in the current study was based on the counts in school textbooks published by Renmin Jiaoyue Publisher.