Examining the Relative Contributions of Morphological Awareness to Chinese Reading Comprehension ()
1. Introduction
Reading is a complicated mental process that requires the corporation of various cognitive skills. Research on reading acquisition has generated many impressive findings in the past decades that inform us about what skills may be universally important for reading, including phonological awareness (Nithart et al. 2011) [1] , rapid naming (Blachman 1984 [2] ; Liu et al. 2017 [3] ), etc. Besides, some skills may be specifically more important for learning individual languages, like morphological awareness for Chinese (Shu et al. 2006) [4] .
In the literature on alphabetic writing systems, evidence shows that reading and vocabulary development are bi-directionally associated with one another with development (Cunningham & Stanovich 1997) [5] , which is also associated with morphological skills (Wysocki & Jenkins 1987) [6] . A study by McBride-Chang et al. (2003) [7] went further and found that morphological skills, vocabulary, and reading were also strongly correlated among Chinese children learning to read Chinese. However, only kindergarten and second-grade children were examined in their study, and it is not known if their study results can be generalized to students in more advanced elementary grades. In the present study, we aimed to address this gap in the literature.
1.1. Morphological Awareness
A series of theoretical and empirical studies have confirmed that children’s morphological awareness and reading development are highly correlated (Carlisle 2000 [8] ; Li et al. 2012 [9] ). Emma et al. (2021) [10] reported that morphological awareness accounted for uniquely important variance in reading comprehension for groups aged 6 - 8 and 12 - 13 beyond other factors including age, nonverbal reasoning, vocabulary, phonological awareness, and word reading. Their results showed that morphological awareness was a fundamental predictor across the reading comprehension ability spectrum and remained even after controlling for other reading-related skills.
According to Carlisle (2000) [8] , morphological awareness can be defined as “children’s conscious awareness of the morphemic structure of words and their ability to reflect on and manipulate that structure”. Chinese is an important language in which to explore morphological awareness because of its unique morphology. In the Chinese language, each morpheme is generally represented as a single syllable. Likewise, Chinese script is sometimes described as morphosyllabic, because each character represents both a syllable and a morpheme, thus the unit of the interface between the written word and the spoken language is a syllable, instead of the phoneme, which corresponds to a morpheme (Liu et al. 2017) [3] .
Common assessments of children’s morphological awareness take the forms of homophone awareness, homograph awareness, and compounding word construction. Children’s ability to distinguish homophones and their morpheme construction skills are believed to explain a significant amount of variance in Chinese word reading, word spelling, and reading comprehension (McBride-Chang et al. 2006) [11] . The fact that there are a large number of homophones in Chinese means that those learning to read Chinese must distinguish characters that have very different written forms but which sound identical.
1.2. Vocabulary Knowledge and Reading
Reading is strongly associated with vocabulary development (Stanovich 1986) [12] . Empirical evidence shows that learners with the sparsest vocabulary levels are often those with the poorest reading skills as well.
The classic theory of the lexical quality hypothesis states that the knowledge and connection of words’ components constitute the basis of reading comprehension (Richter et al. 2013) [13] . Thus, metalinguistic awareness like morphological awareness has been thought to be a good indicator of lexical quality. From this perspective, high precision of the morphology of words would indicate a high quality of lexical representation, which would contribute to a larger vocabulary and in turn enhance reading comprehension (Cheng et al. 2016) [14] .
2. The Present Study
The primary aim of the present study was to examine the interrelationships between morphological awareness, vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension in Chinese based on previous findings and models of reading comprehension. Correlation analysis and hierarchical multiple regression analysis were conducted to examine the unique contribution of morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge to Chinese reading comprehension. Only kindergarten and second-grade children were examined in the previous study, and this paper took the study further by examining if the results can be generalized to students in more advanced elementary grades.
3. Methodology
3.1. Participants
A total of 76 students (40 boys and 36 girls) participated in the study (mean age = 9.45 years old; SD = 0.50). 13 students were excluded from the study because of incomplete data. The participants were recruited from a representative primary school in terms of the socio-economic background of the parents, teaching methods, and children’s Chinese language performance. All participants were native Chinese speakers. Consent forms were obtained from parents and were tested in their schools by trained experimenters.
3.2. Measures and Procedure
3.2.1. Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrice
To measure the reasoning ability and nonverbal intellectual ability of participants, the Revised Raven Standard Reasoning Test China City Edition chaired by Zhang and Wang (1987) [15] of Beijing Normal University was administered to assess the participants’ reasoning ability and control for its potential influence on reading performance. 60 multiple choices were divided into five groups and are listed in order of difficulty. The participants were asked to identify the missing element and select a picture that perfectly completes the pattern from six to eight alternatives. Participants would get one point for one correct answer and the maximum score for this task was 60.
3.2.2. Morphological Awareness
Two aspects of morphological awareness were tested, including homophone awareness and homograph awareness.
In the homophone awareness task, three two-syllable Chinese words were orally presented to the children and the words had an identical syllable. The children were then asked to identify the two words that had a syllable sharing the same meaning and to circle the letters (A, B, or C) assigned to the words according to the presentation order. The position of the target syllables in the words and the order of correct answers were counterbalanced across items. Participants would get one point for one correct answer and the maximum score for this task was 15.
In the homograph awareness task, 20 pairs of two-syllable Chinese words were presented in print. Each pair of words had an identical syllable that may or may not share the same meaning. The children were instructed to tick or cross for each pair (tick for those who share the same meaning and cross for those who do not). Participants would get one point for one correct answer and the maximum score for this task was 20.
3.2.3. Vocabulary Knowledge
20 two-syllable Chinese words were presented in order of difficulty. The children were asked to choose the correct meaning for the words from four alternatives. Participants would get one point for one correct answer and the maximum score for this task was 20.
3.2.4. Reading Comprehension
A narrative passage was used to test children’s reading comprehension ability. The narrative passage is the most common type of genre found in the Chinese language textbook for grade four students.
In the reading task, there were four types of questions for reading comprehension: 1) focus on and retrieve explicitly stated information and ideas, 2) make straightforward inferences, 3) interpret and integrate ideas and information; and 4) examine and evaluate the content, language, and textual elements. Type 1, 2, and 3 questions were asked in the form of multiple-choice questions. Type 4 questions were asked in an open-ended format since they solicit students’ judgment and personal knowledge of the text topic and related issues. There were 20 questions for Type 1, 2, 3, and 4 and 2 questions for Type 4. Only Type 4 required written responses. Students were allowed to write Pinyin for unfamiliar characters and incorrect writing of characters was not penalized.
3.2.5. Procedure
The tasks were given to the children in a number of sessions and after each session participants had a short break before the next one came. All measures were administered to the children by trained testers who were familiar with testing children in these age groups.
4. Results and Discussion
4.1. Descriptive Statistics
Table 1 presents the general performance of 63 participants, covering means,
![]()
Table 1. Means, standard deviations, ranges skewness, and kurtosis for measures.
General reasoning ability was assessed by Raven’s progressive matrices. N = 63.
standard deviations, range of scores, skewness, and kurtosis computed for the various measures in the current study. As the coefficients showed, the mean value of homograph awareness (M = 12.40) was higher than that of homophone awareness (M = 10.33), suggesting that homograph knowledge may be more difficult for fourth graders in acquiring morphological awareness.
4.2. Correlation Analysis
Correlations among all measures included in the study are represented in Table 2. First, as indicated in the table, both morphological tasks, i.e., homophone awareness and homograph awareness task, were significantly correlated with reading comprehension scores among fourth-graders. Specifically, the magnitudes of correlations of the homophone awareness task with reading comprehension (r = 0.536, p < 0.01) were higher than that with homograph awareness, which, however, was also remarkable (r = 0.284, p < 0.05). Second, the correlations between the two dimensions of morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge were also significant. Similarly, homophone awareness had a higher correlation (r = 0.340, p < 0.01) with vocabulary knowledge than homograph awareness (r = 0.269, p < 0.05).
However, the two aspects of morphological awareness measures were not significantly associated with one another, suggesting a low degree of commonality in the current study. And it is not surprising that vocabulary knowledge is saliently correlated with reading comprehension (r = 0.385, p < 0.01), underscoring a positive association between vocabulary knowledge and reading ability.
4.3. Regression Analysis
A series of hierarchical multiple regression analyses were conducted to examine the unique contribution of the three reading-related measures to reading comprehension in the present study. In this equation, we entered all measured variables in the order of hypothesized contribution to reading. General reasoning ability was entered first.
In Step 2, vocabulary knowledge was included. Previous studies with alphabetic languages showed children’s vocabulary knowledge is a fundamental predictor of reading comprehension (Stanovich 1986) [12] . Finally, in step 3, both
![]()
Table 2. Correlations among all measures in this study.
General reasoning ability was assessed by Raven’s progressive matrices. For all variables, N = 63, *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01.
morphological awareness skills were included to test our hypothesis whether these abilities would predict unique variance in Chinese reading.
Hierarchical regression equations showing each step separately are displayed in Table 3. The table demonstrates that general reasoning ability was strongly predictive of reading comprehension. At the next step, vocabulary knowledge was surprisingly not a significant predictor of reading. In Step 3, both morphological awareness tasks were included but, interestingly, only homophone awareness was found to be significantly predictive of unique variance in reading comprehension.
Results of this study have demonstrated that the homophone awareness task designed to measure one aspect of children’s morphological awareness was strongly associated with Chinese reading comprehension among fourth-graders while vocabulary knowledge was not as significant as a predictor after the effect of general reasoning ability was statistically controlled.
These results are solid evidence of the unique role of morphological awareness in early reading development among Chinese children, especially homophone awareness, in line with previous studies that have supported that sensitivity to spellings of homophones is associated with reading (Sprenger-Charolles et al. 1998) [16] .
The great number of homophones in Chinese forces young Chinese readers to learn to distinguish among characters that have very different meanings but sound identical in speech from the very beginning. As Mcbride-Chang et al. (2003) [7] proposed in their study, the task of distinguishing homophones in Chinese requires effortful processing and may relate more strongly to the task of reading itself than in languages with few homophones such as Spanish or English.
However, contrary to the conclusions of other studies (Stanovich 1986) [12] , vocabulary knowledge was not as significant as a predictor of reading after the effect of general reasoning ability was statistically controlled in the current study. This is possible because the evidence supporting the close relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension mainly comes from studies where vocabulary knowledge was examined in the contexts of other reading-related cognitive skills (Cheng et al. 2016) [14] .
![]()
Table 3. Hierarchical regression equations predicting reading comprehension.
General reasoning ability was assessed by Raven’s progressive matrices. For all variables, N = 63, p < 0.05; **p < 0.01.
5. Conclusions
This study is interested in finding out the interrelationships between morphological awareness, vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension among Chinese fourth graders. Results from correlation analysis and hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed that the two aspects of morphological awareness, i.e., homophone awareness and homograph awareness, are closely associated with vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. Besides, homophone awareness was found to contribute unique variance to Children’s reading comprehension.
The present study is, of course, limited in the questions it can answer about children’s reading development. The primary limitation of the present study is that we constructed tasks of only two types of morphological awareness that we thought might be related to the reading of Chinese. It is possible that there are other aspects of morphological awareness that are also strong predictors of Chinese reading that have yet to be tested.
Despite the limitation, the present study has highlighted the importance of morphological awareness as a cognitive component of reading skills, independent of general reasoning ability, in young children. Preliminary results from the current study may facilitate among researchers and practitioners more ideas or tools for understanding interactions between morphological awareness skills and children’s reading ability. For example, activities intended to foster homophone awareness could easily be incorporated into school curricula if they ultimately appear to have predictive value for reading development.