Understanding Chinese children’s morphological awareness and its importance for word reading from error analysis

Purpose: The importance of morphological awareness (MA) for reading in Chinese has been established. However, the design of most of the MA tasks did not allow us to explore the details in participants’ responses. In the present study, the errors the participants made in constructing novel compound words in the compounding production task were analyzed, and thus the relationship between MA and word reading was further explored. Method: 32 third-grade Chinese children in Hong Kong participated in this study. Besides the compounding production task and the character reading task, these children were also administered with phonological awareness and non-verbal intelligence. Results: Moderate correlation between MA and word reading was found in the present study (r = .47, p < .01). The errors children made in the compounding production task were analyzed. Seven types of errors were identified, including: 1) using redundant morpheme, 2) missing critical morpheme, 3) incorrect structure, 4) using relevant morpheme, 5) using improper relevant morpheme, 6) using unrelated morpheme, and 7) no response. The most frequently happened errors were the first, second and fifth types. More interestingly, after controlling for phonological awareness and non-verbal intelligence, the first two types of errors uniquely explained 27.4% (p < .01) of the variance in Chinese character reading. Conclusions: The results in the present study indicated that it was more difficult for our participants to precisely identify critical morphemes to construct compound word; and such ability, as one core component of MA, was important for them to learn new words. Copyright © 2013 Society for the Scientific Studies of Reading (SSSR).