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Morphological Awareness in Vocabulary Acquisition Among Chinese‐Speaking Children: Testing Partial Mediation via Lexical Inference Ability
Author(s) -
Zhang Haomin Stanley
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
reading research quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.162
H-Index - 90
eISSN - 1936-2722
pISSN - 0034-0553
DOI - 10.1002/rrq.89
Subject(s) - vocabulary , mediation , psychology , reading (process) , inference , phonological awareness , reading comprehension , vocabulary development , linguistics , lexical analysis , cognitive psychology , computer science , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , philosophy , political science , law
The goal of this study was to investigate the effect of Chinese‐specific morphological awareness on vocabulary acquisition among young Chinese‐speaking students. The participants were 288 Chinese‐speaking second graders from three different cities in China. Multiple regression analysis and mediation analysis were used to uncover the mediated and unmediated effects of morphological awareness on reading vocabulary knowledge. Results showed that both morphological awareness and lexical inference ability significantly contributed to reading vocabulary knowledge after each factor was controlled for. The ability to extract sublexical morphological information (in the form of derivational awareness and compound awareness) significantly predicted the students' reading vocabulary. More importantly, the study revealed that morphological awareness made a significant indirect contribution to reading vocabulary via lexical inference ability. Findings suggest that morphological awareness enhances young Chinese students' reading vocabulary acquisition by the partial mediation of their lexical inference ability.