development of ma in chinese and english

8/2/2019 Development of MA in Chinese and English

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Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal 16: 399422, 2003.

2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.399

Development of morphological awareness in Chinese and English

YU-MIN KU and RICHARD C. ANDERSONUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA

Abstract. The development of morphological awareness in Chinese and English was invest-

igated in the current study involving 412 Taiwanese and 256 American students in second,

fourth, and sixth grades. The results from both Chinese-speaking and English-speaking

students indicate that the morphological awareness develops with grade level and is strongly

related to reading ability. More proficient readers outperformed less proficient readers when

asked to (1) recognize morphological relationships between words, (2) discriminate word

parts having the same or different meanings, (3) select the best interpretations of low-

frequency derivatives and compounds composed of high-frequency parts, and (4) judge the

well-formedness of novel derivatives and compounds. Chinese students acquisition of deriv-ational morphology seems to lag behind that of compounding rules, which might reflect the

nature of Chinese word formation in that there are far fewer derivatives than compounds in

Chinese.

Key words: Chinese, Morphological awareness, Vocabulary acquisition, Word formation

In daily life, we use or find others using words that we have never heard

before, but we understand each other without further explanation of the novel

words. It seems that language users, especially adult native speakers, under-

stand the internal structure of words, and when they need a new word to

express an idea, they may invent a word that fits word formation rules. There

is evidence from both Chinese and English studies that adults treat complexwords analytically. One sort of evidence is that morphological relationships

between prime and target words influence performance in lexical decision

and word recognition tasks in both languages (Nagy, Anderson, Schommer,

Scott & Stallman, 1989; Taft & Forster, 1976; Taft & Zhu, 1995; Zhang &

Peng, 1992).

When and how children develop implicit knowledge of the structure of

words are fascinating questions, ones of potential importance for under-

standing childrens reading development. The lions share of reading research

has investigated awareness of the phonological structure of words (e.g.,

Blachman, 2000; Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Goswami, 2000; Ho & Bryant,

1997; Shu, Anderson & Wu, 2000), although previous studies have linked

morphological awareness and reading proficiency in the early school years

(Carlisle & Nomanbhoy, 1993; Casalis & Louis-Alexandre, 2000, Mahony,


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400 YU-MIN KU AND RICHARD C. ANDERSON

Singson & Mann, 2000), in the middle school years (Leong, 1989; Tyler &

Nagy, 1989), and in high school and college (Mahony, 1994).

Morphological awareness and vocabulary acquisition

Scholars have long believed that morphological awareness is important in

vocabulary growth (Dale, ORourke & Bamman, 1971; Nagy & Anderson,

1984; Sternberg, 1987; White, Power & White, 1989). For example, Sandra

(1994) suggested, morphology could be a powerful device for facilitating the

acquisition of polymorphemic vocabulary items and improving the retention

of such items (p. 261). Similarly, Carlisle (1995) proposed that morpho-

logical awareness might be particularly important because morphological

decomposition and problem-solving provide one way to understand and learn

the large number of derived words used in the books they read (p. 205).

A large proportion of the unfamiliar words children encounter are morpho-logically complex. Nagy, Osborn, Winsor and OFlahavan (1994) estimated

that, among the 10,000 unfamiliar words that an average American fifth

grader might encounter in reading over the course of a year, about 4,000

would be derivatives of more frequent words. According to Anglins (1993)

study of American childrens vocabulary growth between the first and fifth

grades, the increase in number of derived words known is over three times

greater than the increase in number of root words known by the same children

(14,000 derivatives versus 4,000 root words). This high rate of increase in

knowledge of derived words presumably reflects a process of acquisition that

depends on morphological analysis, at least in part.

How does childrens morphological awareness relate to vocabulary

acquisition? The prevalent belief is that children who are knowledgeable

about morphology decompose unfamiliar words into familiar meaningful

units prefixes, roots, and suffixes and then derive the meanings of the

words by combining the units. For example, the prefix dis- means not or

do the opposite, so when encountering the word disobey for the first time,

children would have an excellent chance of getting the right meaning, not to

obey, by using their morphological knowledge. The process of breaking an

unfamiliar word into units, and then recombining the units into a meaningful

whole, enables children to figure out the meanings of newly encountered

words and may enhance memory for these words. Thus, morphological

awareness is considered an important factor in childrens rapid vocabulary

growth during the elementary school years (Nagy & Anderson, 1984; Tyler& Nagy, 1990; White, Power & White, 1989).

Can children, in fact, infer word meanings through morphological

analysis? Beginning with Freyd and Baron (1982) several studies have given


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DEVELOPMENT OF MORPHOLOGICAL AWARENESS 401

a positive answer to this question. Representative of these studies is one by

Wysocki and Jenkins (1987), who studied whether children in grades four,

six, and eight could derive word meanings through morphological analysis.

Children were first taught a set of words and then two weeks later were asked

to define words that were either derivationally related or not related to the

words they learned in the training session. For example, words like doting,

stipulation, and repudiate were taught, and the test included derivationally

related words, such as dote, stipulate, and repudiation, as well as unre-

lated words, such as transgress, abate, and incipient. The results indicated

that children in all grades performed somewhat better on words that were

derivationally related to previously learned words. This finding confirms the

idea that children can derive word meanings through morphological analysis.

Childrens ability to decompose unfamiliar words might have been underes-

timated by Wysocki and Jenkins (1987) because the children may have tried

to analyze the morphological structure of the words in the unrelated set, but

failed because they lacked knowledge of the base words.The tasks employed by Wysocki and Jenkins (1987) were difficult for

elementary school children, because they had to learn new words and then

infer the meanings of derivatives of these words. Tyler and Nagy (1989) and

White et al. (1989) used simpler tasks. These two studies suggested better

understanding of English derivational morphology than previous studies.

Children were asked to define morphologically complex words by Anglin

(1993), Lewis and Windsor (1996), and Carlisle (2000). Although fidelity to

adult standards for definitions was not high 20% and 32% for third and

fifth graders in Carlisle, and 35% for students in grades four through eight

in Lewis and Windsor it was evident that students had some ability to use

knowledge of word parts to define words. For example, a child demonstratedhis understanding of the agentive suffix -ist in humanist by providing the

definition someone who studies human.

Can Chinese children infer the meanings of unfamiliar words through

morphological analysis? Many scholars (Hatano, Kuhara & Akiyama, 1981;

Hoosain, 1992; Shu, Anderson & Zhang, 1995; Tang, 1988) believe that

morphological awareness plays an important role in Chinese (and Japanese)

reading; however, very little systematic research has been reported in the

literature. A Chinese character usually corresponds to a single morpheme and

characters are the building blocks of longer, more complex words.

According to Hoosain (1992), meanings of the constituents of poly-

morphemic Chinese words are more manifest than often is the case with

constituents of multimorphemic English words (p. 115). Thus, it mightbe easier for Chinese readers than English readers to encode and retrieve

the meanings of polymorphemic words (Hoosain, 1991; Nagy & Anderson,


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1998). Some evidence for this conjecture comes from Shu, Anderson and

Zhangs (1995) cross-cultural study of how Chinese and American children

learn unfamiliar words from context. As compared to American children,

Chinese children were more likely to learn the meanings of morphologically

transparent words than of morphologically opaque words. This implies that

Chinese children made more use of morphological analysis to assimilate word

meanings.

In sum, research on childrens vocabulary acquisition has clearly demon-

strated the importance of morphological awareness for learning word mean-

ings. Understanding the morphological structure of words enables children to

figure out, encode, and remember the meanings of unfamiliar words. There

is some indication that morphological awareness is more important for word

acquisition in Chinese than in English.

Childrens acquisition of morphological knowledge

In one of the first studies, Berko (1958) assessed the ability of American

children, ranging in age from five and one half to seven, to produce plural

and past tense inflections. Children saw a picture card and heard an oral

text missing a target word. They were asked to supply the missing word.

For example, a child was shown a card with a bird-like animal and then two

bird-like animals. At the same time, the child heard the experimenter say,

This is a wug. Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are

two . The child was supposed to say wugs. Berkos results indicated

that children in the preschool years have already acquired some knowledge

of regular inflections.

Analyses of young childrens speech have provided further evidence

supporting the notion that children have acquired basic rules of English

inflection and are able to use the rules productively and spontaneously at

a relatively young age (Kuczaj, 1977; Marcus, Pinker, Ullman, Hollander,

Rosen & Xu, 1992). For example, children may overgeneralize the rules for

creating the past tense, producing words like goed, and eated, and for creating

plurals, producing words such as mans and foots.

The productive use of compounding rules has been observed in spontan-

eous speech among children as young as three years of age. Clark (1981)

claimed, Children, like adults, innovate in order to fill lexical gaps (p. 307).

In other words, children may create new words to express intended meanings

when they lack well-established terms in their lexicons. For example, childrenmay coin compound words like fix-man for a car mechanic, garden-man for a

gardener, and car-smoke for exhaust. Children understand the basic relation-

ship between the component terms in modifier-head compounds at an early


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age, for instance, that doghouse refers to a type of house whereas housedog

refers to a type of dog (Clark, 1981; Clark, Gelman & Lane, 1985). However,

there has been little research on the development of awareness of compounds

over the elementary school years.

Research with adults who speak various languages, including English

and Chinese, suggests that transparent compounds are processed in terms

of constituent morphemes whereas opaque compounds are processed as a

whole (e.g., Dominiek, 1990; Wang, Peng, Guan & Kuang, 1999). It is

uncertain when school children begin to see transparent compounds in terms

of constituents. In one early study, Silvestri and Silvestri (1977) obtained

results which they interpreted to mean that kindergarteners represent familiar

transparent compound words as unanalyzed wholes whereas by fourth grade

children understand how the meanings of components contribute to the

meaning of an entire compound.

School English contains morphologically complex words with a wide

range of semantic transparency. According to Nagy and Anderson (1984),many complex words in school English have meanings that are totally

predictable (p. 310) from constituents (e.g., senselesssenselessly, wash

washcloth). At the other extreme are words in which there is no discernible

semantic connection (p. 311) between a constituent and the whole word, at

least for a modern-day child as opposed to an historical linguist (e.g., fix

prefix, groovegroovy). Nagy and Anderson (1984) found that the frequent

words that predominate in the early grades are less transparent than the less

frequent words introduced in higher grades, which might condition the age at

which children acquire insights into morphology.

Childrens acquisition of derivational knowledge is the most studied

aspect of morphological knowledge among school-age children. In her pion-eering study, Berko (1958) reported that preschoolers and first graders were

unable to produce proper derived forms. For example, when the experimenter

asked children what they would call a man whose job is to zib, about 90%

of children failed to use the agentive affix -er to produce zibber. However,

Carlisle and Nomanbhoy (1993) found that when a derived form preserved the

pronunciation of its base word, the correct response rate was 40.9%, whereas

when the derived form required phonological changes from its base word, the

rate was 11.2%. One possible explanation for the different results in these

studies is that Berko (1958) used nonsense base words whereas Carlisle and

Nomanbhoy (1993) used real words that children might have known.

Tyler and Nagy (1989) conducted a comprehensive investigation of

fourth-, sixth-, and eighth-grade American students knowledge of differentaspects of derivational suffixes. They found that students at fourth grade level

already had the knowledge of the relational aspect of the suffix and were


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able to capitalize on the relationship between the derivatives and the base.

Childrens knowledge of the syntactic contribution of the suffix increased

with grade level. Similarly, childrens knowledge of distributional constraints

on the use of the suffix also increased with grade but was acquired later than

relational and syntactic knowledge.

Derwing and Baker (1979) employed the comes from task for

example, having people judge whether knowledge comes from know to

investigate the influence of phonetic and semantic features on the ability to

recognize morphological relationships. Results indicated that the ability to

recognize real morphological relationships and reject false ones increases

with age. Younger subjects tended to accept false relationships based on

obvious similarity in a single feature (catkitty). Older subjects were able

to recognize nonobvious relationships that are taught in school and also

better able than younger subjects to recognize relationships when word parts

differed in pronunciation but had the same spellings (breakbreakfast).

Carlisle (1988) and Leong (1989) categorized relationships between aderived word and its base word into four types, depending on whether the

derived word involves an orthographic or phonological change from its base.

The four types are: (1) no change (e.g., carecareful), (2) orthographic change

(e.g., beginbeginner), (3) phonological change (e.g., electricelectricity),

and (4) both orthographic and phonological change (e.g., deepdepth). A

consistent finding is that students are most likely to produce derived forms

when no change in orthographic or phonological form is required (Carl-

isle, 1988; 1995; Fowler & Liberman, 1995; Leong, 1989). Students make

more errors in producing derived forms that require phonological or both

orthographic and phonological change. Carlisle (1988) found that 82% of

childrens errors involved words that required a phonological change to makethe derived forms, and most of the errors involved simply retaining the phono-

logical form of the base word. This finding confirms Tyler and Nagys (1989)

thesis; Children will tend to acquire strategies which make as few changes

as possible when forming a new word from an old one (p. 665). The smaller

the change in the structure of the derived words, the easier it is to acquire

these words.

The influence of phonological or orthographic change from a base to its

derived form was also investigated by Mahony (1994) and Mahony, Singson

and Mann (2000), but the task in these studies was to recognize the morpholo-

gical relatedness of pairs of words. Good readers and older students correctly

identified more related word pairs than poor readers or younger students.

However, Mahony and her colleagues concluded that the degree of phono-logical distortion in the derived form does not influence students judgment

of morphological relatedness. It seems that phonological and orthographic


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variability affect production (Carlisle, 1988; Leong, 1989) but not recognition

of morphologically complex forms (Mahony, 1994; Mahony et al., 2000).

Chinese childrens development of morphological awareness through the

elementary school years has not been studied until recently. Li, Anderson,

Nagy and Zhang (2001) developed several tasks to examine the morpholo-

gical awareness of first and fourth graders from the Peoples Republic of

China. In one task employed in the first grade, students were introduced

to a pair of homophonic characters in the context of familiar words. Then

the experimenter orally presented another two-character word and asked

students to choose which written character was appropriate for use in this

word. For example, the experimenter showed the homophone characters

/xin1/ (heart) and /xin1/ (new) and explained that the character

can be used in words such as /xin1zang4/ (heart) while the char-

acter can be used in words such as /xin1nian2/ (new year). Then

the experimenter presented another two-character word familiar from oral

language but unfamiliar in written form, /xin1wen2/ (news). Students weresupposed to select the character to write this new word. Another task

employed by Li and her colleagues (2001) with first graders involved orally

presenting three two-character words that shared a syllable. In two of the

words, the syllable represented the same morpheme. Students had to indicate

which word contained a character that was different from the other two.

For example, students heard /hong2cha2/ (black tea), /lu4cha2/

(green tea), and /jian3cha2/ (to examine). All three words contain the

syllable /cha2/, but only the first two represent the same morpheme. Li

et al. (2001) found that good readers outperformed poor readers on tasks

assessing morphological awareness in both the first grade and the fourth

grade. Wang (1999) used some of the same tasks with Taiwanese first andsecond graders and also found that performance on the tasks was related to

reading proficiency.

Goals of the present study

Research in developmental psycholinguistics has provided evidence that

morphological awareness plays an important role in English-speaking

childrens vocabulary and reading acquisition. However, it is not yet well-

established whether morphological awareness is also important for children

learning Chinese, a very different language with a very different writing

system. The present study is designed to investigate whether morphologicalawareness contributes to the vocabulary acquisition and reading proficiency

of Chinese children as well as American children.


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Table 1. Types of morphemes and examples in Chinese and English.

Morpheme type Chinese English

Root word /shan1/ (mountain) Book

/gou3/ (dog) Hand

Bound root /fang2/ (house) Anti- (against, opposite)

/zhuo1/ (desk) -logy (study)

Inflectional affix /le/ verbal aspect -ed (past tense)

/men/ plural -s (plural)

Derivational affix /wu2/ (not) -er (agentive)

/hua4/ verbalizing -ly (adverb)

Chinese is different from English in terms of orthographic symbols andgrapheme, morpheme, and phoneme relations. However, the word formation

rules of Chinese are similar to those of English. Morphemes in Chinese

and in English can be classified in terms of the same basic elements. In

each language, in addition to free morphemes or root words, there are

three types of bound morphemes: (1) inflectional suffixes, which are gram-

matical morphemes that change a root words aspect, tense, number, case,

etc.; (2) derivational affixes, which usually change the part of speech of

roots; and (3) bound roots, which must combine with derivational affixes

or other roots to form words. Table 1 lists examples of the different types

of morphemes in Chinese and English. In each language, through affixation

and compounding, three types of words are formed: inflected words, derived

words, and compounds.

Despite the similarities in word formation, there are some differences

between Chinese and English morphology. First, the primary way of forming

words in Chinese is to combine roots. Second, although there are far fewer

inflectional and derivational affixes in Chinese than in English, there are

numerous bound roots in Chinese. Unlike most bound roots in English

(e.g., anti- and tele-), Chinese bound roots are less positionally restricted

(Packard, 2000). Third, because approximately 89% of Chinese characters

represent unique morphemes, characters usually provide the reader with

visually distinct and reliable cues for decomposing polymorphemic words.

This study addresses the question of whether, because of language-specific

differences in morphology, Chinese- and English-speaking children followdifferent courses in developing morphological knowledge. In other words,

the current study attempts to determine, not only whether there are common

elements in the acquisition of Chinese and English morphological knowledge,


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but in addition whether there are certain aspects of morphological knowledge

that are important for one language but not for the other.

Comparable Chinese and English tasks were developed with the goal of

equating the difficulty of each task in the two languages. To control for

familiarity, Chinese and English words were equated in frequency of usage.

To control for degree of semantic transparency and degree of morphological

relatedness of words, native speakers of Chinese and English rated the words

used in the tasks. Because, unlike English, word formation in Chinese seldom

involves changing phonological or orthographic form, tasks contained only

word pairs from the two languages that share the same orthographic and

phonological form. In the second grade classrooms in the two countries,

materials were read aloud by the teacher; this was intended to minimize

the possibility that performance would reflect variation in ability to read the

words rather than variation in morphological knowledge.

In summary, comparable tasks were constructed to assess Chinese- and

English-speaking childrens awareness of morphology. The general hypoth-esis was that among both groups of children morphological awareness would

increase with language experience and correlate highly with vocabulary

knowledge and reading proficiency. One specific hypothesis was that morpho-

logical awareness would be more strongly related to reading proficiency

among Chinese-speaking than English-speaking children. The basis for this

hypothesis is that, unlike English, in Chinese [a] word formation hardly

ever involves phonological or orthographic change and [b] most Chinese

characters represent only one morpheme. Another specific hypothesis was

knowledge of derivational morphology would develop more slowly among

Chinese-speaking children. The basis for this hypothesis is that Chinese

derivational affixes are less productive than English derivational affixes.

Method

Participants

Participants were 282 American and 436 Taiwanese second, fourth, and

sixth grade students. The Taiwanese students came from public schools in

Taichung City and Dayuan, the American students from public schools in

Danville, Mahomet, and Fisher, Illinois. In each grade, four classes were

included; two classes were selected from a school or schools in which most

of the students were from working-class families, while the other two wereselected from another school in which most of the students were from middle-

class families. Upon the request of one participating American sixth-grade

teacher, two more of her classes were also included in the study.


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Twenty-six American and twenty-four Taiwanese students were elimin-

ated because they were absent during one experimental session. This left a

total of 668 participants, 412 Taiwanese students (131 in second grade, 145 in

fourth grade, and 136 in sixth grade) and 256 American students (65 in second

grade, 62 in fourth grade, and 129 in sixth grade).

Tasks

Six tests were developed to assess different aspects of morphological aware-

ness, vocabulary, and reading proficiency. The tests were the Recognize

Morphemes Test, the Discriminate Morphemes Test, the Judge Pseudowords

Test, the Select Interpretations Test, the Select Vocabulary Test, and the

Reading Comprehension Test.

Recognize Morphemes Test. A morpheme recognition task was constructed to

test childrens knowledge of the morphological relationships between pairsof words. Students saw 20 pairs of words followed by yes and no. For each

pair, students were asked to judge whether the second word comes from

the first one, that is, whether the meanings of the two words are related. For

example, English-speaking children were asked to indicate whether the word

teacher comes from the word teach. Chinese-speaking children were asked

to indicate whether the meaning of the two-character word /shu1jia4/

(bookshelf) is related to meaning of the first component character /shu1/

(book). All the words were familiar to the children from oral language. To

make the English and Chinese word pairs comparable, the complex word in

each English word pair had no phonological or spelling change from the root

word. Skilled readers of Chinese or English rated the words in the tests for

morphological relatedness. These ratings were used to equate the items in the

Chinese and English tests.

Discriminate Morphemes Test. The morpheme discrimination test was

designed to determine whether children understand that a word part may have

different meanings in different complex words. The test lists 20 groups of

words. Each group consists of three words that share a part. In two words,

the common part has about the same meaning. The task for the children is

to circle the odd word, the one in which the common part has a different

meaning. For an English example, among the words classroom, bedroom,

and mushroom, the meaning of room in the first two words means a divi-

sion of a building, with its own walls, floor and ceiling; but the room inmushroom means something else. For a Chinese example, among the words

/shang1pin3/ (merchandise), /shang1dian4/ (shop; store), and

/shang1liang2/ (to consult), the last one is odd because the meaning of the


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character is not business or merchant. Words used in the tests were familiar

to students from oral language. Second-grade teachers rated whether their

students were familiar with the words meanings. These ratings were used to

equate the Chinese and English tests.

Select Interpretations Test. The purpose of this task was to examine whether

children could apply their knowledge of the morphology of compounds and

derivatives to select proper interpretations of 16 low-frequency derived and

compound words that contained high-frequency base words. The English

words were chosen from Francis and Kucera (1982) and the Chinese words

from the Institute of Information Science Academia Sinica (1993). Only

words that occurred fewer than 5 times per million were included in the

tests. The task for the subjects was to select the proper interpretation of

each word from among four choices. Here is an example in English: rebuild:

(1) to build a house with bricks, (2) a man whose job is to build houses,

(3) a tall building, and (4) to build again. An example in Chinese is, :(1) , (2) , (3) ,

and (4) . To select the meaning of the word rebuild correctly,

English-speaking students have to understand the meaning of the prefix re-.

Depending solely on the knowledge of the base word build, without recog-

nizing the meaning added by the prefix re- would not be enough to select the

correct interpretation from the alternatives. Similarly, in the Chinese example,

(marksman), in order to select the proper interpretation, Chinese-

speaking students have to know that is an agentive suffix and that it denotes

a person who has certain skills or abilities.

Judge Pseudowords Test. A checklist test was constructed to measure the

childrens ability to apply word formation rules to novel vocabulary items.

The items were intermixed with the general vocabulary items from the

Select Vocabulary test described later. The task for the subjects was simply

to check whether or not they knew the meanings of the items. The items

were possible and impossible derivatives and compounds. Possible derivat-

ives were formed observing distributional constraints (e.g., -ly attaches to

adjectives but not to verbs) whereas impossible derivatives violated distribu-

tional constraints. Possible compounds conformed to word formation rules

and all of them were semantically plausible. Impossible compounds were

words that were semantically implausible. High-frequency stems were used

to form pseudo-derivatives and pseudo-compounds, so that responses would

depend on awareness of word formation rules rather than knowledge of theconstituent stems.


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The English test consisted of 20 possible pseudowords and 20 impossible

pseudowords. There were two types of possible items. One type was a

possible compound of two words, but not an existing word in the language,

such as cowhouse; the other type was a possible derivative but not an existing

one, such as heartful. The impossible items included ill-formed compounds,

such as mansmall, and ill-formed derivatives, such as muchable.

The Chinese test also contained 20 possible pseudowords and 20

impossible pseudowords. The possible items were of two types. One was

a possible compound of two characters but not an existing word, such as

; the other was a possible derivative but not an existing one, such as

. The impossible items included ill-formed compounds, such as ,

and ill-formed derivatives, such as . The scoring formula for the Judge

Pseudowords Test was proportion yes for possible items minus proportion

yes for impossible items, divided by one minus proportion yes for impossible

items.

Select Vocabulary Test. This was a wide range, general vocabulary test in the

checklist format (Anderson & Freebody, 1983). The students simply indi-

cated whether they knew the meanings of the items. As already stated, the

items were intermixed with the items from the Judge Pseudowords Test.

The English version of the Select Vocabulary Test contained 100 words

chosen from a word frequency book (Francis & Kucera, 1982). Some were

very high-frequency words, which children as young as second graders

should know, such as strong, simple, and student, and some were low-

frequency words, which may not be known by sixth graders, such as concede,

fuzzy, and seam. The range of word frequency was from 5 to 202 per million.

To control for guessing, the test included 20 pronounceable nonwords. These

nonwords were constructed from pronounceable nonsense syllables, such as

derg, and did not contain any identifiable morphemes.

The Chinese test consisted of 100 general words selected from a word

frequency book (Institute of Information Science Academia Sinica, 1993).

These words included some very high-frequency words, such as , ,

and , and some low-frequency words, , , and . The

range of word frequency was from 3 to 200 per million. To control for

guessing, 20 two-character nonwords, each containing one non-character,

were constructed. A non-character was composed of two legal components

but was not an existing combination in Chinese, such as .

Scores were corrected for guessing using the high threshold formula

proposed by Anderson and Freebody (1983). The formula for estimatingthe number of words that a child knows is the proportion of hits on words

minus the proportion of false alarms on nonwords, divided by one minus the


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proportion of false alarms on nonwords. A hit means that a child checks a real

word yes, whereas a false alarm means that a child checks a nonword yes.

Reading Comprehension Test. The subjects reading proficiency was mea-

sured with grade-appropriate reading comprehension tests. Different tests

with similar formats and contents were administered to Chinese-speaking and

English-speaking students. The English test was the reading comprehension

subtest in the Metropolitan Achievement Tests, Seventh Edition. The Chinese

test was compiled from several reading comprehension tests available in

Taiwan; seven passages were selected for second graders and nine for fourth

and sixth graders; children had to answer five multiple-choice questions after

reading each passage. The difficulty of the passages and the questions that

accompany the passages increased with grade level. A z score was computed

for each student, standardized within grade level and language group.

Procedure

There were two separate test sessions on different days for all Chinese-

speaking students and fourth-grade and sixth-grade English-speaking

students. On the first day, the Reading Comprehension Test was admin-

istered. The second day was for the Recognize Morphemes Test, Discriminate

Morphemes Test, Select Interpretations Test, Judge Pseudowords Test, and

the Select Vocabulary Test. For English-speaking second-grade classes, the

four morphological tests were divided into two test sessions because class

sessions were only 25 minutes in length.

Each test was administered as a group test to the whole class. The class-

room teachers read the directions and explained sample items. Because

children in the second grade might not be able to read some of the words,

teachers in the second-grade classes were asked to read each word aloud in

the Recognize Morphemes, Discriminate Morphemes, and Select Interpreta-

tions tests. Fourth-grade students were encouraged to ask for help from their

teachers if they had trouble reading any of the words.

Results

The basic results of the study are shown in Table 2. The table contains the

mean proportion correct following adjustment for guessing on the measures

of morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge for Chinese-speakingand English-speaking students in second, fourth, and sixth grades. Reading

proficiency is not shown in Table 2, because different measures were used in

different grades and the comparison across grades would not be meaningful.


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Table 2. Means and standard deviations for American and Taiwanese students by

measure and grade level

Measures Grade level

Second Fourth Sixth

Recognize Morphemes American 0.60 (0.25) 0.80 (0.24) 0.84 (0.19)

Taiwanese 0.51 (0.26) 0.68 (0.26) 0.84 (0.20)

Discriminate Morphemes American 0.58 (0.25) 0.69 (0.21) 0.81 (0.12)

Taiwanese 0.55 (0.25) 0.71 (0.20) 0.81 (0.12)

Select Interpretations American 0.44 (0.21) 0.56 (0.21) 0.71 (0.19)

Taiwanese 0.40 (0.26) 0.62 (0.24) 0.80 (0.18)

Judge Pseudowords American 0.25 (0.27) 0.37 (0.26) 0.41 (0.22)

Taiwanese 0.15 (0.26) 0.38 (0.37) 0.43 (0.29)

Select Vocabulary American 0.27 (0.27) 0.60 (0.21) 0.80 (0.14)

Taiwanese 0.23 (0.40) 0.71 (0.21) 0.90 (0.12)

Note: Scores have been adjusted for guessing; standard deviations are in parentheses.

Table 3. Correlations between measures of morphological awareness and vocabulary

knowledge.

Measure 1 2 3 4 5

1. Recognize Morphemes 0.49 0.42 0.30 0.47

2. Discriminate Morphemes 0.55 0.53 0.35 0.57

3. Select Interpretations 0.51 0.68 0.37 0.63

4. Judge Pseudowords 0.23 0.29 0.38 0.46

5. Select Vocabulary 0.51 0.56 0.68 0.43

Note: Correlations for Chinese-speaking children appear below the diagonal; those

for English-speaking children above the diagonal. All correlations are statistically

significant at the 0.01 level.

Analyses of variance verified that performance improved as a function of

grade on every measure in both language groups (all Fs> 25, all Ps< 0.001).

The correlations between the four tests of morphological awareness and

vocabulary are given in Table 3. Correlations for Chinese-speaking children

appear below the diagonal; those for English-speaking children above the

diagonal. The table shows that the measures had moderate to high inter-

correlations. The Discriminate Morphemes and Select Interpretations testshave higher correlations with vocabulary knowledge than do the Recog-

nize Morphemes and Judge Pseudowords tests. The pattern of correlations

for the two language groups is similar. The correlations are a little higher


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Table 4. Performance of American and Taiwanese students on compounds and derivatives by

grade and measure

Grade Measure

Discriminate morphemes Select interpretations Judge pseudowords

Compound Derivative Compound Derivative Compound Derivative

American

Second 0.59 (0.25) 0.56 (0.34) 0.42 (0.26) 0.48 (0.23) 0.34 (0.35) 0.15 (0.28)

Fourth 0.69 (0.22) 0.69 (0.25) 0.52 (0.30) 0.60 (0.24) 0.44 (0.35) 0.30 (0.30)

Sixth 0.83 (0.13) 0.78 (0.19) 0.68 (0.22) 0.65 (0.25) 0.43 (0.29) 0.39 (0.27)

Taiwanese

Second 0.60 (0.25) 0.42 (0.35) 0.41 (0.27) 0.39 (0.34) 0.32 (0.36) 0.00 (0.37)

Fourth 0.75 (0.22) 0.62 (0.26) 0.58 (0.50) 0.56 (0.39) 0.52 (0.50) 0.25 (0.34)

Sixth 0.85 (0.13) 0.71 (0.20) 0.79 (0.19) 0.82 (0.25) 0.53 (0.35) 0.34 (0.29)

Note: Scores have been adjusted for guessing; standard deviations are in parentheses.

for the Chinese-speaking students, except in instances involving the Judge

Pseudowords Test.

Three of the four morphological measures included both derivatives and

compounds, although it should be cautioned that the measures were not

designed to equate derivatives and compounds on extraneous factors that

could influence performance. Of the 16 low-frequency words used in the

Select Interpretation Test, 6 were derivatives and 10 were compounds. In

the Discriminate Morphemes Test, 6 out of 20 items involved distinguishing

derivatives from pseudo-derivatives (e.g., teacher, farmer, and shoulder). The

Judge Pseudowords Test contained 20 derivatives and 20 compounds.

Table 4 presents the means and standard deviations of students perfor-

mance on derivatives and compounds in the three tests that contained both

types of words. Analyses of variance with grade level as the between-subjects

factor and word type (derivative vs. compound) as the within-subjects factor

confirmed a significant effect of grade on each measure in both language

groups (all Ps < 0.01).

With regard to type of complex word, the general trend was for Chinese-

speaking children to score higher on compounds while English-speaking

children scored higher on derivatives, but there were inconsistencies among

the three tests. Chinese-speaking students had significantly higher scores oncompound words than on derived words from the Judge Pseudowords Test

(F(1,409) = 170.90, P < 0.001) and the interaction between word type and

grade was also significant F(2,409) = 3.71, P < 0.05). From Table 4, it is


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clear that difference between performance on compounds and derivatives was

greater for younger students. On the Discriminate Morphemes Test, Chinese-

speaking students in all three grades performed better on compounds than

derivatives, F (1,409) = 131.25, P < 0.01, however, on the Select Interpret-

ations Tests performance was similar on the two types of words. Like the

Chinese-speaking children, the English-speaking children had higher scores

on the compounds than the derivatives from the Judge Pseudowords Test

(F(1,253) = 30.38, P < 0.001). The English-speaking students performed

equally well on compounds and derivatives from the Discriminate Morph-

emes Test, whereas on the Select Interpretation Test, they had significantly

higher scores on derivatives than on compounds, F(1,253) = 19.35, P< 0.01).

A principal component analysis of the four morphological measures was

performed and, then, first principal component scores were computed to

serve as an overall indicator of students morphological awareness. The first

principal component is the best linear combination of the four specific

measures, best in the sense that it accounts for the maximum amount ofcovariance among the measures. Using a principal component score as

the overall indicator of morphological awareness minimizes the influence

of extraneous features of the individual measures, such as peculiar task

demands, idiosyncrasies of particular items, and performance floors or ceil-

ings. Thus, the first principal component score is as pure an indicator of

morphological awareness as the data afford.

The total variance accounted for by the first principal component was

59% and 56% for Chinese-speaking and English-speaking students, respec-

tively. The Discriminate Morphemes and Select Interpretation Tests were

the most influential measures in the formation of the component scores for

both language groups. The loadings for the two language groups are virtuallyidentical; thus, it seems acceptable to combine the data of Chinese-speaking

and English-speaking students to form a common principal component. The

total variance accounted for by the first principal component from the pooled

data was 58%. Component scores based on the pooled data provide a common

metric to compare the importance of morphological awareness in vocabulary

knowledge and reading comprehension for the two language groups.

An analysis of variance of pooled component scores indicated a signifi-

cant grade effect, F(2,662) = 161.72, P < 0.001, which confirms once again

that older students are more aware of the underlying principles that govern

the formation of morphologically-complex words. The overall difference

between Chinese-speaking and English-speaking students was not significant

(F < 1, P = 0.33); however, there was a significant interaction of gradeand language, F(2,662) = 4.09, P < 0.05. Figure 1 depicts the develop-

ment of morphological awareness across grade levels for Chinese-speaking


17/24


Figure 1. Morphological awareness as a function of grade for American and Taiwanese

students.

Table 5. Correlations of morphological awareness with vocabulary and

reading for Taiwanese and American students at three grade levels.

Measure Grade level

Second Fourth Sixth

Taiwanese Vocabulary 0.51 0.56 0.60

Reading 0.73 0.73 0.63

American Vocabulary 0.52 0.62 0.54

Reading 0.67 0.60 0.63

Note: All correlations are statistically significant at the 0.01 level.

and English-speaking students. As Figure 1 suggests, the interaction was

due to the difference between the morphological awareness of Chinese-

speaking and English-speaking second graders, F(1,194) = 5.02, P < 0.05.

Chinese-speaking sixth graders were slightly but not significantly ahead of

English-speaking sixth graders.Table 5 shows the correlation of students morphological awareness (as

represented by first principal component scores) with vocabulary and reading.

Among both Chinese-speaking and English-speaking students, morpholo-


18/24


Table 6. Regression analyses predicting reading proficiency from morphological aware-

ness after entering vocabulary knowledge

American Taiwanese

R2 R2 F R2 R2 Fchange change change change

Second grade

Step 1. Vocabulary 0.393 0.393 40.82 0.230 0.230 38.60

Step 2. MA 0.559 0.166 23.39 0.551 0.321 91.39

Fourth grade

Step 1. Vocabulary 0.461 0.461 51.32 0.311 0.311 64.45

Step 2. MA 0.513 0.052 6.25 0.564 0.253 82.46

Sixth grade

Step 1. Vocabulary 0.261 0.261 44.84 0.510 0.510 139.74

Step 2. MA 0.440 0.179 40.19

0.576 0.065 20.51

MA morphological awareness.P < 0.05; P < 0.01.

gical awareness is highly related to vocabulary knowledge and reading

proficiency. The correlations between morphological awareness and vocab-

ulary knowledge are similar for Chinese-speaking and English-speaking

students, whereas the correlations between morphological awareness and

reading proficiency are slightly higher for Chinese-speaking students.

Hierarchical regression analyses were performed to explore the extent to

which morphological awareness makes a contribution to childrens reading

development beyond sheer amount of vocabulary knowledge. Table 6 indi-cates the additional variance in reading proficiency attributable to morpho-

logical awareness when it is entered after vocabulary knowledge. In each

grade morphological awareness makes a significant independent contribution

to the reading proficiency of both Chinese-speaking and English-speaking

students. What is noteworthy is the substantial contribution of morphological

awareness to the reading development of Chinese-speaking second and fourth

graders. The additional variance accounted for was 32% and 25%.

Discussion

The current study provides strong evidence that both Chinese-speaking and

English-speaking students morphological awareness develops with increas-

ing experience with language and that awareness of word structure is highly


19/24


related to vocabulary and reading acquisition. The study shows that the devel-

opment of morphological awareness among English- and Chinese-speaking

children is similar, despite the large differences in their languages and

writing systems, and the differences in culture and traditions of education in

Taiwan and mid-America. The finding that childrens morphological aware-

ness develops with grade is consistent with previous research (Carlisle, 1988;

1995; Tyler & Nagy, 1989; Leong, 1989; Singson et al., 2000; Wysocki

& Jenkins, 1987), but most of this research investigated English-speaking

childrens knowledge of English derivational morphology. The current study

shows that Chinese-speaking childrens knowledge of Chinese morphology

also develops with grade level. The current study goes beyond previous

studies in either English or Chinese by exploring childrens acquisition of

compounding rules as well as derivational morphology.

The Taiwanese children probably would have outperformed the Amer-

ican children if the full range of compounds and derivatives in Chinese and

English had been examined. As we have stressed, English-speaking childrenhave trouble when the pronunciation or spelling of morphemes shifts from

word to word (e.g. Carlisle, 1988), but such words were excluded in the

present study because in Chinese there are seldom shifts in spoken or written

forms of morphemes and we were attempting to equate the tasks in the two

languages.

Chinese-speaking children displayed somewhat more awareness of the

morphology of compounds than English-speaking children, especially in the

fourth and sixth grades. In contrast, Chinese-speaking children displayed less

awareness of derivational morphology; this was especially true of second

graders, marginally true of fourth graders, while the difference between

Chinese-speaking and English-speaking children had largely disappearedamong sixth graders. These patterns are readily understandable considering

the structure of the two languages. Compounds are more common and prob-

ably more transparent in Chinese than in English. Derivational affixes in

Chinese are less productive than derivational affixes in English. A contrib-

uting factor may be differences in instruction about word formation in

Taiwan and America. Interviews with two American second-grade teachers

in one participating elementary school revealed that second graders have

been introduced to derivational principles governing high-frequency and

productive affixes like un-, re-, -less, and -er. As a matter of fact, being

able to use word analysis (analyzing complex words into root words, inflec-

tions, derivational affixes) to identify words is part of the state second grade

English-Language Arts Standards in Illinois. In contrast, Taiwanese teacherstold us that Chinese instruction focuses on learning to pronounce and write

each character correctly rather than on morphological analysis of words.


20/24


This study confirms strong relationships of morphological awareness

to vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension, which supports the

notion that childrens insights into the internal structure of words play an

important role in reading development. Similar findings have been reported

in other recent studies. For example, Mahony et al. (2000) found a correlation

of 0.40 between English-speaking elementary school students vocabulary

and morphological awareness, assessed with a test similar to the Recog-

nize Morpheme Test. In the current study the correlation between these

two measures was 0.47. Carlisle (2000) used two production tasks that

required third and fifth graders to produce correct derived forms and provide

definitions for morphologically complex words. She found correlations of

performance on these two tasks with vocabulary and reading comprehension

were about 0.40 and 0.20 for third graders and 0.60 and 0.66 for fifth graders.

The correlations in the three grades examined in the present study ranged

from 0.52 to 0.62 for vocabulary and from 0.60 to 0.67 for reading compre-

hension. The lower correlations Carlisle obtained for third graders may beattributable to the additional demands of production tasks she used, which

may be especially difficult for children of this age.

Two previous studies have examined the relation of Chinese childrens

morphological awareness to reading achievement and vocabulary knowledge.

Wang (1999) found correlations of 0.59 and 0.45 between morphological

awareness and reading and vocabulary, respectively, in a sample of first and

second graders. The figures obtained by Li et al. (2001) were 0.26 and 0.59

for first graders and 0.56 and 0.47 for fourth graders. The current study

found higher correlations between morphological awareness and reading

achievement (r= 0.630.73) and similar correlations between morphological

awareness and vocabulary knowledge (r = 0.51

0.60). Correlations withreading achievement might have been higher in the present study because

the tests used in this study were more extensive, with at least 7 passages and

35 questions, whereas the other two studies used sentence reading tests or

short passage reading tests. Another possible explanation is that the measures

in Wang (1999) and Li et al. (2001) were mostly designed to assess the

childrens awareness at the level of single characters, namely, the insight

that the radical in a semantic-phonetic compound character conveys a clue

to its meaning, while the measures in this study focused on the childrens

understanding of the structure of words composed of two or more characters.

Theoretically, it would seem that morphological awareness is directly

related to vocabulary acquisition but only indirectly related to reading profi-

ciency. Thus, we had expected higher correlations between morphologicalawareness and vocabulary knowledge than between morphological awareness

and reading level. The data were not consistent with this expectation. Perhaps


21/24


the reason is that the reading achievement measures we employed were more

reliable than the measures of vocabulary knowledge.

Chinese characters usually represent only one morpheme and there are

far fewer phonological and orthographic shifts in the formation of complex

words in Chinese than in English. At the same time, Chinese has many

more homophones than English, so the Chinese child who is not making

good use of morphological information will frequently be confused. There-

fore, because of the characteristics of Chinese and English, we had expected

morphological awareness to be more strongly related to reading level among

Chinese-speaking children than among English-speaking children. The data

were weakly consistent with this hypothesis.

The robust correlations obtained in the present study between morpholo-

gical awareness and reading level could not have been due to hidden variation

in vocabulary knowledge. In the first place, we constructed tests using only

high-frequency roots and affixes. Every child should know these word parts

or, at least, has had innumerable opportunities to learn them. In the secondplace, morphological awareness accounts for substantial amounts of vari-

ance in reading level after variance attributable to vocabulary is removed

(see Table 6). Thus, the following conclusion is warranted: Children who are

good readers for their age are aware of the information in word parts, able to

decompose complex words into informative parts, and able to use information

in word parts to estimate the meanings of unfamiliar complex words. That

similar findings were obtained with languages as different as Chinese and

English supports the conjecture that morphological awareness is universally

important in learning to read.

Acknowledgement

The research reported in this paper was supported in part by a grant from the

Spencer Foundation.

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