The dimensionality of morphological awareness in reading comprehension among Chinese early adolescent readers

Recent research has included multiple measures of morphological awareness to address the dimensionality of morphological construct in the context of modeling skilled reading. However, a majority of studies have an Anglocentric focus. The current study aims to extend the previous studies to logographic learners by evaluating the dimensionality of morphological awareness in higher-order reading comprehension among Chinese adolescent readers. A total of 686 early adolescent students (339 fifth-grade students and 347 sixth-grade students) participated in the study. They completed a series of morphological awareness measurements (morpheme recognition, morpheme discrimination, and compound structure awareness), vocabulary knowledge, lexical inference and reading comprehension. By testing three alternative path models, the study showed that morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge were best represented as parallel covariates in predicting Chinese reading comprehension. More important, the study highlighted the mediator of lexical inference in associating morphological awareness, vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension among Chinese readers. Empirical findings suggest that morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge seem to be under a unitary construct in logographic reading acquisition and that word-meaning inference ability connects the path between morphological awareness and reading comprehension. These findings contribute to the complexity in the conceptualization of Chinese morphological awareness and reading instruction by examining the ways in which the morphological construct supports higher-order reading development.