Spanish L2 Chinese Learners' Awareness of Morpho-Syntactic Structures in the Reading Comprehension of Splittable Compounds.

Ziming Lu,Ying Dai,Yicheng Wu

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.783869

Abstract

Reading comprehension is never considered a simple task in linguists’ views as it requires a full set of linguistic knowledge, such as word decoding, understanding syntactic and morphological structures, and deriving proper meanings from these structures in a given context. Bearing the simple view of reading, the primary goal of this study is to explore whether the split presentation of Chinese splittable compounds influences the recognition of the compounds in second language (L2) Chinese reading comprehension, and how the reading skills, i.e., word decoding and linguistic comprehension, cooperate to complete this reading comprehension task. Splittable compounds (SCs) in Chinese are typically verbs composed of two constituents with limited separability. The separable property of SCs and their vague morpho-syntactic status are supposed to cause difficulties for L2 Chinese learners in recognizing the compounds. Especially for those whose native language manifests lexical integrity, the split presentation of the compounds may invite the L2 Chinese readers to process them with a mechanism different from that for their non-split forms. To the best of our knowledge, the efforts on investigating this issue are insufficient. In this study, 27 Spanish speaking L2 Chinese learners were invited to complete tasks including reading and interpreting 6 selected SCs in the split and non-split forms, rating their familiarities with each SC and reporting the syntactic category of the SCs based on their existing linguistic knowledge. The results, showed that the split presentation of SCs did cause challenges for L2 Chinese learners in recognizing the compounds in the reading process, regardless of their Chinese proficiencies. The L2 Chinese participants performed significantly worse in recognizing split SCs in salient Verb-Object structures than recognizing those in unsalient Verb-Object structures. These findings underscore the importance of linguistic comprehension in L2 Chinese in-text word reading comprehension and suggest words as the basic processing units.

Highlights

Bearing the simple view of reading, the primary goal of this study is to explore whether the split presentation of Chinese splittable compounds influences the recognition of the compounds in second language (L2) Chinese reading comprehension, and how the reading skills, i.e., word decoding and linguistic comprehension, cooperate to complete this reading comprehension task
The results suggested that L2 Chinese learners found processing the split Splittable compounds (SCs) challenging, especially when the split forms were in salient V-O structures
The findings indicated that in the reading comprehension of complex Chinese words, both compound awareness and syntactic structure awareness could be activated, but the awareness of syntactic structure might obstruct, to some degree, the L2 Chinese reading comprehension

Summary

Introduction

DECODING AND LINGUISTIC COMPREHENSIONReading, though consisting of multiple “intricate workings of the human mind” (Huey, 1968: 6), can be viewed as involving two main tasks, decoding and linguistic comprehension (e.g., Fries, 1963; Venezky and Calfee, 1970; Perfetti, 1977; Gough and Tunmer, 1986; Hoover and Gough, 1990; Tunmer and Hoover, 1993). Decoding allows language in written form to be recognized, and linguistic comprehension includes the interpretation of given lexical information as well as syntactic structures and contextual implications This simple view, as Tunmer and Hoover (1993) have emphasized, does not deny the complexities of the reading process, but addresses the importance of skills needed for language comprehension in addition to word decoding, such as determining the meanings of words in syntactic structures and deriving proper meanings from the structures in a given context. Decoding in this simple view refers to a matching process from printed graphic representations to the mental lexicon. The phonological decoding strategy is still overprivileged and relied on when processing unfamiliar words in print

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