| Morphological processing has primarily been studied from two relatively separate directions: adults' morphological processing during lexical access, and children's morphological awareness in relation to literacy development. In the present study, both children's implicit morphological sensitivity and explicit morphological awareness were tested, in order to comprehensively explore Chinese children's morphological processing and its association with their Chinese character reading and vocabulary knowledge.;A total of 153 third grade Chinese children from northeastern China were recruited (87 boys, and 66 girls, mean age = 9.15, SD = ..43). Morphological sensitivity was tested using a visual priming lexical decision paradigm, and morphological awareness was tested with a set of morphological awareness tasks, including a morphological construction task, a homophone production task, and a newly-designed compounding production task.;In relation to morphological sensitivity, on average these third grade Chinese children did not show adult-like morpheme processing during lexical access, possibly because the morpheme priming effect had not yet emerged in this age group. In addition, morphological structure processing was found during the lexical processing of subordinate compounds, but not coordinative compounds, which had an influence on lexical processing only when there was no semantic relation between primes and targets.;Furthermore, structural equation modeling analyses showed that morphological sensitivity had a significant direct effect on morphological awareness and a significant indirect effect on children's Chinese character reading performance and vocabulary knowledge, which was fully mediated by morphological awareness, even after controlling for children's phonological awareness, non-verbal intelligence, age, semantic sensitivity to specific Chinese compound words, and their response speed to these words. In the final model, in which Chinese character reading and vocabulary were combined, similar results were obtained.;The present study was among the first to explore implicit and explicit morphological processing at the same time, their relationship, and the role of morphological processing for children's language and literacy development. Findings not only help us explore children's morphological processing in more detail but also provide potentially useful ideas for designing future literacy intervention programs and teaching / learning materials. |
