Abstract
The aim of this study is to examine the developmental relationship between compounding awareness and vocabulary knowledge from grades 1 to 2 in Chinese children. In this study, 149 Chinese children were tested on compounding awareness and vocabulary knowledge from Time 1 to Time 4, with non-verbal IQ, working memory, phonological awareness, orthographical awareness, and rapid automatized naming at Time 1 as control variables. Latent growth modeling was conducted to analyze the data. Univariate models separately calculated children's initial levels and growth rates in compounding awareness and vocabulary knowledge. Bivariate model was used to examine the direction of the developmental relationships between the two variables with other cognitive and linguistic variables and the autoregression controlled. The results demonstrated that the initial level of compounding awareness predicted the growth rate of vocabulary knowledge, and the reverse relation was also found, after controlling for other cognitive and linguistic variables and the autoregression. The results suggested a reciprocal developmental relationship between children's compounding awareness and vocabulary knowledge for Chinese children, a finding that informs current models of the relationship between morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge.
Highlights
Vocabulary knowledge has been found to be an important indicator of language development and to play an important role in reading comprehension and children’s school achievement (Ouellette, 2006; Dickinson and Porche, 2011; Zhang et al, 2013)
Latent growth modeling was conducted to examine the direction of developmental relationship between compounding awareness and vocabulary knowledge
We firstly modeled the development of compounding awareness and vocabulary knowledge separately, which was to ascertain the univariate growth model for further examining the temporal direction of the relationship between them
Summary
Vocabulary knowledge has been found to be an important indicator of language development and to play an important role in reading comprehension and children’s school achievement (Ouellette, 2006; Dickinson and Porche, 2011; Zhang et al, 2013). Several studies have shown that morphological awareness is correlated with vocabulary knowledge beyond control variables across languages (e.g., Ku and Anderson, 2003; McBride-Chang et al, 2006; Nagy et al, 2006; Liu and McBride-Chang, 2010). We speculated that the developmental relationship between morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge would be reciprocal. Using a multiwave longitudinal design, the goal of the present study was to explore whether compounding awareness supports development in vocabulary knowledge and vice versa among Chinese children (e.g., McBride-Chang et al, 2008). Understanding the direction of developmental relationship between Chinese children’s compounding awareness and vocabulary knowledge has both theoretical and applied value for instruction
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