What are the contributing cognitive-linguistic skills for early Chinese listening comprehension?

Little is known about the cognitive-linguistic skills contributing to early listening comprehension (LC) of Chinese language, an analytic language with abundant compound words. The present study took the initiative to 1) examine whether the established cognitive-linguistic skills of LC in non-Chinese languages, (i.e., working memory, vocabulary skills, grammatical skills, comprehension monitoring), have similar importance in Chinese LC and 2) to identify novel skill (i.e., morphological skills) that could be unique to Chinese LC. A total of 105 Hong Kong-Chinese children at first grade participated in the current study. Results from multiple regression showed that each of the aforementioned skills, except for grammatical skills, had unique contribution to early Chinese LC. Morphological skill was the most prominent unique contributor. Based on path analysis results, we put forward a systematic path model which illustrated the specific roles – both direct and indirect roles – of the cognitive-linguistic skills in the context of each other. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.