The Research On The Development Of Kindergartener’s Compounding Awareness And Its Relationship With Linguistic Skills

Foreign researches have shown that awareness of inflectional morphology was a strong predictor of the early development of literacy skills in English children.This conclusion was closely related to the features of English morphological structure.English is a highly inflected language. As a result, the major principles of inflection are acquired by the younger. More than 70% of the words are compound words in Chinese,and the children are exposed to the environment of the highly compound.From this,We hypothesize that compounding awareness plays a prominent role in Chinese children’s literacy skills development.Whether this assumption is established or not?Whether the affect that the features of the morphological structure to literacy skills also exist in Chinese?If the assumption is true,what characteristic does compounding awareness have ?What is the relationship between compounding awareness and linguistic skills and how does the compounding awareness affect the preschool children’s reading?However,less previous research has specifically focused on the relationship between compounding awareness and literacy skills of Chinese young children.In this paper, participants included 96 kindergarteners in Nanchang.We investigated the developmental features of compounding awareness in kindergartener,and explored the role of compounding awareness on linguistic skills development when controlling the role of age and phonological awareness.In the end,we investigated how did the compounding awareness affect reading.The results as followed:(1)The preschool children showed different levels of development in two aspects of the compounding awareness,word construction awareness developed earlier than head of compound awareness.The middle-class children approached high level on word construction,and all preschool children developed rapidly on head of compound awareness.(2)Compounding awareness had a significant effect on different aspects of linguistic skills.The role of two aspects of morphological awareness to reading comprehension was different.Word construction awareness explained unique variance in character recognition,vocabulary and reading,and head of compound awareness only predicted the scores of vocabulary.From this,word construction awareness hadmore predictive than head of compound awareness.(3)Compounding awareness affected reading by two ways.On one hand,compound awareness straightly affected reading;On the other hand,compounding awareness indirectly affected reading by vocabulary.Vocabulary was a mediating variable between compounding awareness and reading.