Development of morphological awareness in Chinese and English

The development of morphological awareness in Chinese and English was investigated in the current study involving 412 Taiwanese and 256 American students in second, fourth, and sixth grades. Four morphological measures (Recognize Morphemes Test, Discriminate Morphemes Test, Select Interpretations Test, and Judge Pseudowords Test) and one Select Vocabulary Test were administered to students in all three grades to assess the growth in different aspects of morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge. A grade-appropriate Reading Comprehension Test was given to students within each grade to measure their reading proficiency. Because the current study aimed to compare Chinese- and English-speaking children's development of morphological awareness and the significance of morphological awareness in their vocabulary and reading acquisition during the school years, the morphological tests were developed to be of comparable difficulty in the two languages.; The results from both Taiwanese and American students indicated that the morphological awareness develops significantly with grade level. More proficient readers outperformed less proficient readers when they were asked to (1) recognize morphological relationship between words, (2) discriminate a word containing a part or a character that was used with a substantially different meaning, (3) select proper interpretations for low-frequency derivatives and compounds of high frequency root words, and (4) judge the well-formedness of novel derivatives and compounds. Further, the results showed that the awareness of the morphological structure was significantly correlated with students' reading proficiency and vocabulary knowledge.; Although Taiwanese students had a lower level of morphological understanding than American students at second grade, Taiwanese sixth graders were slightly but not significantly ahead of American sixth graders. The acquisition of Chinese derivational 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. Because the correlation between morphological awareness and reading proficiency was higher among Taiwanese students than American students, morphological awareness appears to be more important for Chinese-speaking children's reading development than English-speaking children's reading development.