Concurrent and Longitudinal Effects of Morphological Awareness on Reading Comprehension Among Chinese-Speaking Children

Abstract

This study explored the concurrent and longitudinal effects of morphological awareness on the development of reading comprehension among Chinese-speaking children (N = 123, meanage = 8.1 at Time 2). Drawing upon multivariate analyses, the study found that morphological awareness and lexical inferencing ability were intertwined together to predict Chinese children's development of reading comprehension. More importantly, the result revealed that Chinese morphological awareness contributed to reading comprehension across time via the mediation of lexical inferencing ability. The study suggests that Chinese children's morphological sensitivity has a significant impact on lexical inferencing ability, which, in turn, contributes to reading comprehension concomitantly and longitudinally.