Morphological and cognate awareness in L2 Japanese word learning: evidence from Chinese-speaking learners

ABSTRACT

The current study reported an empirical investigation that tested the collective and individual effects of morphological awareness and cognate awareness on Japanese word learning among Chinese learners of Japanese. 131 Chinese learners of Japanese participated in this study. They completed morphological awareness measurements (morpheme segmentation, morpheme analysis and homophone awareness), cognate awareness measurements that tapped into three different types of bilingual cognates, as well as two word-learning measurements (definitional knowledge and lexical inference). Drawing upon multivariate regression analysis, the study demonstrated that cognate awareness contributed to L2 Japanese word learning. Awareness of false cognates yielded stronger predictions in both outcome measurements. Regarding morphological awareness, the study indicated that morphological awareness had a unique contribution to L2 Japanese word learning above and beyond cognate awareness. More specifically, the findings underscored the importance of morpheme analysis and homophone awareness in Japanese word learning.

KEYWORDS:

• False cognates
• homophone
• morpheme discrimination
• morpheme analysis
• lexical inference

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The standardized Japanese language proficiency test (JLPT) ranges from N5 to N1 (N1 being the highest level).

2 The order of cognate awareness and morphological awareness was switched, and the results remained the same.

Additional information

Funding

The study was sponsored by the National Social Science Foundation of China [grant number 21CYY047].

Notes on contributors

Haomin Zhang

Haomin Zhang is Zijiang Young Scholar Professor of Applied Linguistics and Associate Dean of the School of Foreign Languages at East China Normal University. His work centers on psycholinguistics and biliteracy acquisition. His research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Contemporary Educational Psychology, Reading and Writing, and Reading Research Quarterly.

Jie Sun

Jie Sun is a PhD candidate at the Department of English of Sun Yat-sen University. He has a Master's Degree in Foreign Languages and Literatures from East China Normal University. His research interests are multilingual reading processing and children's language acquisition.

Yuting Han

Yuting Han is a PhD candidate in the Department of English of East China Normal University, China. She has a Master's Degree in Chinese International Education at Inner Mongolia Normal University, Huhhot, China. Her research interests are multilingual acquisition and language testing.

Song Yin

Song Yin is Associate Professor of Japanese at East China Normal University, Shanghai, China. She received her PhD degree from Ochanomizu University, Tokyo, Japan. Her research interest is second language acquisition of Japanese.