title: Relations between awareness of morphosyntactic structures in Chinese compound words and reading abilities: A short report.
abstract: This is a short report of the investigation of the relationship between awareness of morphosyntactic structures in Chinese compound words and reading abilities on 268 fourth graders studying in three mainstream schools in Shenzhen. All children were assessed using reading and cognitive tasks including rapid automatized naming, phonological, orthographic and morphological awareness. A compound production task using pseudo compound words with different morphosyntactic structures in the first and second levels as stimuli was also conducted. Results of ANOVA indicated that main effect of first level morphosyntactic structures, main effect of second level morphosyntactic structures and interaction effects between the two were significant. Children's awareness of different morphosyntactic structures were affected by frequency of usage of individual morphosyntactic structures in the language. Results of hierarchical regression analyses revealed that the awareness of morphosyntactic structures in Chinese compound words is strongly associated with Chinese reading abilities. Theoretical and clinical implications were discussed.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies , The Hong Kong Polytechnic University , Hong Kong , China.
authors.forename: Dustin Kai-Yan
authors.initials: DK
authors.lastname: Lau
authors.affiliation: b Department of Chinese Language Studies , The Education University of Hong Kong , Hong Kong , China.
authors.forename: Yuan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Liang
authors.affiliation: a Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies , The Hong Kong Polytechnic University , Hong Kong , China.
authors.forename: Man Tak
authors.initials: MT
authors.lastname: Leung
mesh_terms: D044466:Asian People; D001364:Awareness; D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D006801:Humans; D007807:Language Tests; D010700:Phonetics; D011932:Reading
keywords: Chinese; morphological awareness; morphosyntax; reading