The reciprocal contributions between children’s vocabulary knowledge and word structure awareness and their contributions to reading comprehension in Chinese: A longitudinal study from grades 3 to 6

Background: Previous research across languages found that children’s vocabulary knowledge related to word structure awareness (i.e., the awareness of the grammatical structures embedded in compound words), which both contributed to reading comprehension. However, few studies have examined the dynamic relationships between vocabulary knowledge and word structure awareness, or their joint contributions (including developmental rates) to reading comprehension. This study sought to fill this gap in the case of Chinese, which is an ideal target language given its complex structures of compound words.

Method: We followed up with 123 Mandarin Chinese-speaking children in Mainland China from Grades 3 to 6, with one testing point in the fall of each grade, thus a total of four testing times. Each time, we measured all participants’ oral vocabulary knowledge, awareness of word structure, and passage reading comprehension as the key variables, and assessed their Chinese character reading and two-character word reading fluency as two control variables in all model analyses. All measures were adapted from published studies and found to be highly reliable and valid.

Results and Conclusion: We conducted latent growth curve models, as appropriate. Children’s vocabulary knowledge in Grade 3 predicted the developmental rate of word structure awareness over Grades 3-6, which then predicted reading comprehension in Grade 3. However, these results were not found the other way around. Importantly, children’s vocabulary knowledge and word structure awareness in Grade 3, as well as the developmental rates of these two over Grades 3-6, all significantly predicted children’s reading comprehension level in Grade 6. Copyright © 2023 by Association for Reading and Writing in Asia.