The contribution of morphological awareness to lexical inferencing in L2 Chinese: Comparing more‐skilled and less‐skilled learners

Abstract

Learners’ ability to infer unknown words’ meanings (lexical inferencing) plays a key role in word knowledge development for second language (L2) learners. It has recently been acknowledged that learners’ sensitivity to word‐internal structures (morphological awareness) makes an important contribution to L2 lexical inferencing. However, it remains unclear whether the contribution of morphological awareness to lexical inferencing is affected by L2 learner‐related factors (e.g., language skills). Data obtained from five paper‐pencil tasks in Chinese for 73 L2 learners who studied Chinese for two semesters in China showed that (1) for more‐skilled learners, morphological awareness significantly contributed to lexical inferencing with and without contextual cues, whereas no significant relationships existed between morphological awareness and lexical inferencing for less‐skilled learners; and (2) L2 learners’ morphological awareness does not equally facilitate lexical inferencing due to a possible threshold of linguistic knowledge. The findings have implications for learners’ success in inferring the meanings of unknown words