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Cross-Linguistic Morphological Awareness in Chinese Heritage Language Reading Acquisition

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Abstract

The study aimed to explore cross-linguistic contributions of morphological awareness to Chinese reading acquisition among Chinese heritage language (CHL) learners who had grown up speaking Chinese at home, received English medium education throughout schooling, and were studying Chinese at the time of the study. The sample thus represents a growing number of heritage-language (HL) speakers in US schools whose literacy development is not yet well documented. Little is known, to date, as to how HL literacy development benefits from the linguistic and metalinguistic resources gained through early oral language exposure. In the study, college-level CHL students (N = 195) completed a series of reading measures in their dominant language (English) and heritage language (Chinese). Path analysis was employed to test the cross-linguistic relationships in morphological awareness and lexical inference ability. The findings showed that dominant-language morphological awareness was significantly related to lexical inference skills in two languages. More critically, the current study tested the direct and indirect contributions of dominant-language morphological awareness to HL lexical inference. The results showed that dominant-language morphological awareness contributed only indirectly to HL lexical inference through HL morphological awareness and dominant-language lexical inference. Based on the findings, four tentative conclusions can be drawn: morphological awareness and lexical inference skills transfer across languages; cross-linguistic interaction only occurs between corresponding subskills; transferred subskills are modified to accommodate the target language properties; and the benefits of transferred subskills are realized only through their corresponding subskills in the target language. Practical implications of the findings are also discussed regarding HL instruction and learning.

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Notes

  1. There are six levels in the HSK test.

  2. +: Accurate morphological/contextual information: inaccurate morphological/contextual information.

  3. Chinese morphological awareness is the composite of morpheme segmentation and morpheme discrimination.

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Acknowledgements

The study was sponsored by the Peak Discipline Construction Project of Education at East China Normal University, Shanghai Planning Project of Philosophy and Social Sciences (Grant No.: 2018EYY009), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No.: 2017ECNU-HLYT007; 2018ECNU-QKT015).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Education, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

    Haomin Zhang

  2. The Foreign Language Teaching and Research Center, School of Foreign Languages, East China Normal University, Foreign Languages Building, 500 Dongchuan Road, Shanghai, 200241, China

    Haomin Zhang

  3. Department of Modern Languages, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA

    Keiko Koda

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  1. Haomin Zhang
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Correspondence to Haomin Zhang.

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The study has been approved by the IRB office of Carnegie Mellon University (Protocol number: HS15-296) and has been performed in accordance with the ethical standards as laid down in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Zhang, H., Koda, K. Cross-Linguistic Morphological Awareness in Chinese Heritage Language Reading Acquisition. J Psycholinguist Res 50, 335–353 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-020-09722-7

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