Abstract
This study aims to examine the contribution of morphological awareness to second language (L2) Chinese reading comprehension through potential mediating factors. Adult L2 Chinese learners (n = 447) participated in the study and completed two morphological awareness tasks (segmentation and discrimination), two vocabulary knowledge tasks (character knowledge and word-meaning knowledge), one lexical inference task, and one reading comprehension task. By testing alternative path models, this study identified the preferred model assuming the covariates of morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge. Morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge jointly contributed to L2 Chinese reading comprehension through lexical inference. The written modality of morphological awareness induced the activation of both morphological and orthographic information in print. The result suggests that morphological awareness (in the form of grapho-morphological knowledge) and vocabulary knowledge seem to be two parallel components under the same construct predicting Chinese reading comprehension. More importantly, this study underscores the intermediary effect of lexical inference in associating morphological awareness and reading comprehension in L2 Chinese learners.
Highlights
Chinese Morphological AwarenessMorphological awareness was broadly defined as the sensitivity to morphemic structures of words and the ability to reflect upon morphological structures (Carlisle, 1995)
The results demonstrated that cross-linguistic compound awareness made significant contributions to Chinese reading comprehension
The results showed that morphological awareness did not contribute directly to Chinese reading comprehension
Summary
Chinese Morphological AwarenessMorphological awareness was broadly defined as the sensitivity to morphemic structures of words and the ability to reflect upon morphological structures (Carlisle, 1995). Chinese morphology is characterized by lexical compounding given that modern Chinese does not mark tenses or parts of speech morphologically (Sun, 2006), and compounding is the most salient word-formation rule in Chinese (Ceccagno and Basciano, 2007). Corpus-based analyses have indicated that 75–80% of Chinese words are formed by two or more morphemes/characters (Packard, 2000). The processing of Chinese multi-morphemic words starts from the structural segmentation of fundamental orthographic units of words (Taft and Zhu, 1995). The structural and functional information of morphologically complex ones is encoded through individual characters (morphemes). The meaning of 播音员 (broadcaster) can be activated through structural segmentation and functional mapping. The meaning can be retrieved based on each functional element: 播 (broadcast), 音 (sound), and 员 (professional)
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