The effect of boundedness on reading Chinese words across primary grades

Abstract

This study was to investigate the effect of boundedness on reading Chinese words across primary grades in Hong Kong. Morphological awareness is crucial for complex word learning, in which meanings of morphemes are interpreted and stored. As bound morphemes cannot stand-alone as independent words and they always appear as constituent characters in complex words, their meanings may not be able to be directly accessible and could only be accessed when the morphemes are encountered in several complex words with related meanings. Therefore, increase in language exposure was hypothesized to allow a person to retrieve meanings of bound morphemes and store them as individual words. This was investigated by lexical decision task, reading aloud of complex words and reading aloud of constituent morphemes in the present study. Results of t-tests showed that there was effect of boundedness on accuracy rate in reading aloud complex words and constituent morphemes, but not in lexical decision task. Implications of the findings on the development of word reading would be discussed. Mental representations of morpheme meanings became clearer in higher grades for both bound and free morphemes due to increased language exposure.