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Selected Development Project
 
Project Title

Unfolding the Role of Morphological Awareness in Word Learning of Chinese Children
對詞法意識在說中文兒童中的作用機制之探究
 
Principal Investigator Dr LIU Duo
 
Area of Research Project
Psychological Studies
 
Project Period
From 01/2015 To 12/2017
Objectives
  1. To examine the facilitating effects of morphological awareness on the utilization of morphological information during lexical decision for children in second grade.
  2. To investigate whether morphological awareness exerts a direct influence on vocabulary knowledge and semantic radical awareness, which in turn may influence word reading in Chinese.
  3. To examine whether instructions on morphological knowledge can facilitate second and fourth graders to learn new words in the word learning task
Methods Used

A 2-year longitudinal study and a brief intervention study will be conducted in this project. In the longitudinal study, the mediating roles of vocabulary, and semantic radical awareness on the association between morphological awareness and Chinese character reading will be examined. At the same time, the association between morphological awareness and morphological sensitivity, measured with a classical priming lexical decision task, will be investigated as well. In the brief intervention study, the role of morphological awareness in facilitating the learning and memorizing of Chinese words through providing extra clues will be further examined.
Summary of Findings

Since the project is still on going, there is no published findings at this moment.

We expect that a. both vocabulary and semantic radical awareness will act as partial mediators in mediating the association between morphological awareness and Chinese character reading; b. morphological awareness will help children develop their morphological sensitivity and thus organize their lexical network based on morphological information; and c. morphological awareness can provide extra clues or information for facilitating children to learn new Chinese words and characters.
Impact

The unfolding of the association between morphological awareness and learning to read is significant both theoretically and practically. Theoretically the establishment and verification of the importance of morphological awareness should be just the first step in constructing a comprehensive profile of the role of morphological awareness in Chinese children’s reading development. We also need to know the underlying mechanism (i.e. how morphological awareness helps children learn to read) and the limiting conditions (i.e. in what situations morphological awareness is more important). Practically, the findings of this project can help us design intervention programs that incorporate morphological instruction and evaluate the effectiveness of such instruction. In summary, since the importance of morphological awareness in learning to read in Chinese has been established, this proposed project is among the first to take the next step, in an attempt to achieve a more sophisticated understanding of the complex relationship.

Selected Output

Journal Articles

Liu, D., Li, H., & Wong, R. (2017). The anatomy of the role of morphological awareness in Chinese character learning: The mediation of phonological awareness, vocabulary and semantic radical knowledge and the moderation of morpheme family size. Scientific Studies of Reading. Published online. doi: 10.1080/10888438.2017.1278764
Liu, D. (2017). The Influence of Morphological Structure Information on the Memorization of Chinese Compound Words. Reading and Writing. Published online. doi: 10.1007/s11145-017-9754-0

Conference Paper

Xu, Z., & Liu, D. (25, Feb, 2017). Semantic relation processing in Chinese compounds of children with good and poor morphological awareness. Poster presented at the 1st Annual Meeting of the Association for Reading and Writing in Asia, Hong Kong, China.
Liu, D., & Xu, Z. (25, Feb, 2017). Perceptual simulation in language comprehension of Chinese children with poor reading abilities. Poster presented at the 1st Annual Meeting of the Association for Reading and Writing in Asia, Hong Kong, China.
Liu, D., & Li, H. (15 July, 2016). Understanding the role of morphological awareness in reading Chinese characters by exploring the mediation of phonological awareness, vocabulary, and orthographic knowledge and the moderation of morpheme family size. Poster presented at the 23rd Annual Meeting of Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, Porto, Portugal.
Liu, D. (19 February, 2016). The processing of morphological structure information during Chinese compound word memorization. Poster presented at the 2016 East Asia Joint Symposium on Reading and Spelling (EASRS), Seoul, Korea.

Biography of Principal Investigator

Dr. Liu Duo is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Special Education and Counselling. His research interests focus on cognitive development and related problems, especially on language and literacy development and difficulties, metalinguistic processing and developmental models. He has interests in adopting both experimental and correlational approaches in tapping related research issues.
Funding Source

General Research Fund