The role of morphological awareness in Chinese and English word reading: Language constraints on transfer

Abstract

Purpose – The current study set out to evaluate the linguistic interdependence hypothesis (Cummins, 1981) by examining the unique contributions of L1 Chinese and L2 English morphological awareness to word reading in both Chinese and English across grade 2, 5 and 8 Chinese-English bilingual children.

Method – Grade 2 (N=150), 5 (N=158), and 8 (N=159) children completed five tasks of Chinese morphological awareness which tapped for compounding awareness, homophone awareness, homographic awareness, semantic radical awareness, and affix awareness, and six English morphological judgment and analogy tasks that assessed morphological awareness at three levels: inflection, derivation, and compounding. English phonological awareness, Chinese and English vocabulary, and nonverbal ability were measured as controls. Word reading was assessed in both languages.

Results – Across grade 2, 5 and 8, within-language analyses revealed that Chinese and English morphological awareness accounted for unique variances in Chinese and English word reading respectively above the control measures. Critically, there were cross-language influences: Chinese morphological awareness explained 4% of unique variance in English word reading in Grade 2 after controlling for IQ, English vocabulary, English phonological awareness, and English morphological awareness; English morphological awareness explained significant variances in Chinese word reading, i.e., 4%, 3%, and 4% in Grades 2, 5, and 8 respectively, after the relevant controls.

Conclusions – Consistent with the linguistic interdependence hypothesis, there was a bi-directional cross-language transfer of morphological awareness to word reading in L1 Chinese and L2 English. However, the direction of its transfer may be constrained by some language-specific morphological features.