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Development of morphological awareness in Chinese and English

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Abstract

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. The results from both Chinese-speaking and English-speaking students indicate that the morphological awareness develops with grade level and is strongly related to reading ability. More proficient readers outperformed less proficient readers when asked to (1) recognize morphological relationships between words, (2) discriminate word parts having the same or different meanings, (3) select the best interpretations of low-frequency derivatives and compounds composed of high-frequency parts, and (4) judge the well-formedness of novel derivatives and compounds. Chinese students' acquisition of 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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign, Illinois, USA

    Yu-Min Ku

  2. Center for the Study of Reading, 158 Children's Research Center, 51 Gerty Drive, Champaign, IL, 61820, USA

    Richard C. Anderson

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  1. Yu-Min Ku
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Ku, YM., Anderson, R.C. Development of morphological awareness in Chinese and English. Reading and Writing 16, 399–422 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1024227231216

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