The Effect Of The Meaning Of Morpheme On The Acquisition Of Lexical Meaning Of Chinese As A Second Language

In the field of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language, a hot topic is that whether the meaning sense of a Chinese word can be acquired simply by combining the meaning of morphemes which construct the word. A study was conducted to look into the matter whether learners of Chinese as a L2 can successfully guess the meaning of a new word with their knowledge about Chinese lexical structure and morphemes. The result shows that impediments to the conjecture of the meaning of a new word involve the lexical structure and written form of the word, the extent to which morphemes can imply the meaning of the word, the multiple meanings of a morpheme, as well as the learners' knowledge and experience of the world, and the syntactic feature of learners' LI; and that learners show poor acquisition of the meaning of the new words of which the lexical meaning "equals to" the combination of the meaning of morphemes that make up the word. Suggestion of this study for the teaching of vocabulary of Chinese as a L2 is that the meaning sense of vocabulary should be explained and taught as a whole in place of being separated into morphemes.