Learning to Read Chinese: The Relative Roles of Phonological Awareness and Morphological Awareness

Abstract

Phonological awareness and morphological awareness have been shown to affect Chinese children's reading development. Previous studies conducted in Hong Kong, which required children to read two-character words only or a mixture of single-character and two-character words in a Chinese reading test, exclusively found that morphological awareness was more important than phonological awareness in Chinese reading. The studies conducted in China and Taiwan, which measured Chinese reading only at the single-character level, revealed that morphological awareness and phonological awareness both had their unique contributions to Chinese reading. One possible reason for these somewhat inconsistent results may lie in the fact that reading two-character words presumably involves the analysis of morphological structures, which is rarely engaged in single-character reading. To address the inconsistency in previous findings, the present study aims to separately examine single-character reading and two-character reading among Chinese children in Taiwan, and how phonological awareness and morphological awareness affect the two aspects of Chinese reading. In addition, phonetic radical awareness and semantic radical awareness are also important in learning to read Chinese and theoretically can be fostered by phonological awareness and morphological awareness, respectively. Given this, radical awareness could possibly mediate the relationship between phonological awareness/morphological awareness and Chinese reading. This mediation issue is also investigated in the present study. In this study, a total of 109 monolingual Chinese third graders in Taiwan were administered a battery of tests measuring phonological awareness (onset-rime awareness), morphological awareness (homophone awareness and morphological construction), phonetic radical awareness, semantic radical awareness, vocabulary knowledge, and abilities of single-character and two-character reading. A series of multiple regression analyses and path analyses were conducted to analyze the data. It was found that morphological awareness played a greater role than phonological awareness in both single-character and two-character reading. In addition, phonetic radical awareness completely mediated the relationship between phonological awareness and single-character reading, whereas semantic radical awareness only partially mediated the relationship between morphological awareness and two-character reading. The results are explained from the linguistic, orthographic and developmental perspectives.