Morphological Awareness and Literacy Acquisition in Chinese Children

Morphological Awareness and Literacy Acquisition in Chinese

Children

Presenter

Haomin (Stanley) Zhang

Presentation Outline

1. The research goal

2. Conceptual framework and literature review

3. Path model and hypotheses

4. Research design

Participants

Instrumentation

Data collection and procedures

5. Results and discussion

6. Limitations and future directions

Research Goal

1. To understand the mechanism of morphological

awareness in early literacy development (including

the development of vocabulary knowledge and

reading comprehension)

2. To explore Chinese-specific metalinguistic awareness

in the development of reading ability

3. To create a model to test the path routes of early

literacy development

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

AND LIT REVIEW

Morphological Awareness

Morphological awareness (MA) is the knowledge a speaker has

about the mapping of sound to meaning in a given language

and his/her understanding of the word formation rules that

guide the combination of morphemes (Kuo & Anderson,

2006).

Morphological awareness was defined as “the awareness of

morphemic structures of words and the ability to reflect on

and manipulate that structure” (Carlisle, 1995, p.194).

Koda (2000) argues that there are two layers of morphological

awareness:

(1) the ability to recognize and extract sub-lexical morphemic

information; (2) the ability to understand morphemic

structures and their relationships.

Chinese-specific Morphological

Structures Morphology: inflectional morphology (e.g., third-person -s)+

derivational morphology (e.g., prefixes: dis- un-)+

compounding morphology (e.g., class+room)

Modern Chinese does not mark tense or parts of speech

morphologically, with the result that there are only four salient

inflection-like affixes in modern Chinese: the plural marker for

human nominal, 们 –men; the perfective aspect marker, 了 –le; the experiential marker, 过 –guo; the imperfective marker,

着 –zhe. (Sun, 2006)


Structures (cont’d) Few studies have investigated the relationship between

inflectional performance and reading acquisition beyond the

second grade (Kuo & Anderson, 2006) in either English or

Chinese, since acquisition of major inflectional structures is

completed by early elementary grades (e.g., Berko, 1958;

Anisfeld & Tucker, 1968).


Structures (cont’d) Compounding is the most productive means of word formation

in Chinese (Ceccagno & Basciano, 2007).

75%-80% of Chinese words are compounds formed from two or

three morphemes/characters (Packard, 2000; Xing, 2006).

In addition, Lü (1984) maintains that disyllabic compounds and

roots with derivation-like morphemes represent 61% of the

three thousand most commonly used Chinese words.


Structures (cont’d) 90% of nouns are right-headed and 85% of verbs are

left-headed (Packard, 2000; Sun, 2006). For

example, 火山 huǒ-shān (fire-mountain “volcano”),

电脑 diàn nǎo (electric-brain “computer”), and 足球

zú qiú (foot-ball “soccer”) are compound nouns that

have a nominal formant on the right.

By contrast, in the compound verbs 杀死 shā sǐ (kill-die

“kill”) and 禁止 jìn zhǐ (forbid-stop “forbid”), the

verbal formant occurs on the left.


Structures (cont’d)

A growing body of recent work has endorsed the

important role of lexical compounding knowledge in

reading acquisition among Chinese-speaking children

(e.g., Ku & Anderson, 2003; Chen, Hao, Geva, Zhu, &

Shu, 2009; Liu & McBride-Chang, 2010; Zhang &

Koda, 2012; Liu, McBride-Chang, Wong, Shu, &

Wong, 2013; Zhang, 2013).


Structures (cont’d)

Cross-language transfer

Zhang (2013) and Zhang & Koda (2014): Chinese

compound awareness was transferred to contribute to

English word meaning inference and English reading

ability.

Direct and Indirect Effects of

Morphological Awareness Recent studies have probed the causal relationships

among morphological awareness, vocabulary

knowledge and reading comprehension under the

Structural Equation Modeling framework (e.g., Nagy

et al., 2006; Kieffer & Lesaux, 2012; Zhang & Koda,

2012).



(Nagy et al., 2006; Kieffer & Lesaux, 2012)

Morphological

Awareness

Vocabulary

Knowledge

Reading

Comprehension



(Koda, 2005; Zhang & Koda, 2012)

Morphological

Awareness

Lexical

Inferencing ability

Reading

Comprehension

HYPOTHESES AND

RESEARCH DESIGN

Path Model

Hypotheses and Research Questions

1. Does morphological awareness make a significant

contribution to lexical inference ability? Does morphological

awareness make a significant contribution to vocabulary

knowledge directly or indirectly through lexical inference

ability?

2. Does morphological awareness significantly contribute to

reading comprehension after adjusting for lexical inference

ability and vocabulary knowledge? Do lexical inference ability

and vocabulary knowledge mediate the effect of morphological

awareness on reading comprehension?

Participants

Participants were 123 Chinese second-grade students

(68 boys and 55 girls; mean age=7.6 years).

Students were from a public school in Suzhou, China.

They had two to three Chinese classes (including

reading, oral communication and exercise classes)

every day.

Measures and Instruments

Derivational awareness

Compound awareness

Compound structure awareness

Vocabulary knowledge

Lexical inference ability

Reading comprehension


Derivational awareness and compound awareness were measured

by a recognition task and a discrimination task (extraction and

segmentation ability)---adapted by Ku (2001)

For example,

画-画家，沙-沙发, 高-高兴 – recognition task

学者，读者，或者 ---discrimination task


Compound structure awareness was measured by compound

production task. (understanding structural relationships) –

adapted by Liu and McBride-Chang (2010)

猫在跳舞叫什么? 猫舞？舞猫？

Compounding Structures Examples

Subordinate 绿草(green-grass) adj_n

Coordinate 山水(mountain-water) n_n

Subject-predicate 狗叫(dog-bark) n_v

Verb-object 拉门 (pull-door) v_n


The reading ability test was used to measure children’s

lexical inference ability and reading comprehension

skill. The reading test comprised three reading

passages with an average length of 220 Chinese

characters.

10 lexical inferencing items: infer unknown words by contextual

information and partial word information (e.g. 停歇)

14 reading comprehension questions: 1. identify/locate specific

information 2. gist detection

Data Collection Procedures

Separate tasks in different weeks

Counterbalanced

Random assignment

The total time allotment was 70-80

minutes.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Descriptive Statistics and Bivariate

Correlations Measure Minimum Maximum M SD

Derivational Awareness (13) 5 13 9.83 1.58

Compound Awareness (27) 14 26 21.74 2.52

Compound Structure (20) 9 20 14.97 2.16

Vocabulary Knowledge (100) 22.2 92.1 63 15.77

Lexical Inference Ability (10) 2 10 7.33 1.65

Reading Comprehension (14) 5 14 11.2 2.30

Measure 1 2 3 4 5

1. Derivational Awareness -

2. Compound Awareness .48*** -

3. Compound Structure .20* .36*** -

4. Vocabulary Knowledge .29** .44*** .24* -

5. Lexical Inference Ability .40*** .43*** .42*** .38*** -

6. Reading Comprehension .36*** .37*** .33*** .39*** .46***

Path Model Testing

Direct and Indirect effects

Direct and Indirect Effects on

Vocabulary Knowledge Morphological awareness and lexical inference ability

successfully predicted vocabulary knowledge (37.6%

of variance explained).

Chinese compound awareness had a unique and

significant effect on vocabulary knowledge among

second graders, a fact which underlined the

importance of Chinese lexical compounding in the

development of young children’s vocabulary

knowledge.


Vocabulary Knowledge (cont’d) It was also demonstrated that lexical inference ability is a

mediator connecting morphological awareness and

vocabulary knowledge.

Children’s ability to segment and detect segmental

morphological clues enhances their development of

vocabulary knowledge.

For instance, 书包，背包，钱包

Elementary-age children who can segment one compound word

and extract the key morphological cue 包(bag) should be able to

learn and memorize compound words containing that particular

morpheme relatively quickly.


Reading Comprehension No direct effect of morphological awareness on reading

comprehension was found.

Lexical inference ability and vocabulary knowledge,

both of which developed by MA mediated the impact

of MA itself on the path model to influence reading

comprehension skill.

LIMITATION AND FUTURE

DIRECTIONS

Limitations and Future Direction

Comprehensive reading measures by drawing a latent

variable

Cross-sectionality----Longitudinality

Q & A

谢谢

Lexical Inference Ability

Koda (2005) maintains that contextual lexical inference creates a

pathway between intraword awareness (e.g. morphological

awareness) and word-knowledge development, which

ultimately contributes to both vocabulary knowledge and

reading comprehension.

Haastrup (1991) conceptualized lexical inference ability as

“making informed guesses as to the meaning of a word, in

light of all available linguistic cues in combination with the

learner’s general knowledge of the world, her awareness of

context and her relevant linguistic knowledge” (p.40).

Morphological Awareness and Literacy Acquisition in Chinese Children

Documents

Transcript of Morphological Awareness and Literacy Acquisition in Chinese Children