The Development of Young Chinese Children’s Morphological Awareness: The Role of Semantic Relatedness and Morpheme Type

1. Introduction

Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in language. In all languages, morphemes are combined in a rule-based manner to form morphologically complex words. It is necessary to make the basic distinction between two types of morphology: inflectional and word-formation morphology. In inflection, the output of a morphological operation belongs to the same lexical entry as the input (e.g. play > plays; played). Word formation, on the other hand, includes a number of different morphological processes such as conversion (zero derivation), derivation (addition of affixes to stems), and compounding (combination of roots), in which the input and output do not belong to the same lexical entry (e.g. play, verb > play, noun; player; playful; playfulness; screenplay). Word formation is less regular than inflection and requires attention to the lexicon and language typology, which makes it more difficult to acquire (Clark, 2001).

The purpose of the research reported in the present paper was to investigate the development of morphological awareness among young Mandarin-speaking Chinese children from kindergarten to the early primary grades. Morphological awareness is the explicit insight that words can sometimes be divided into morphemes and the ability to manipulate morphological structure (Cazden, 1974; also Bialystok, 2007; Carlisle, 1995). Morphological awareness is essential for word identification, spelling, and reading comprehension across many languages(e.g. Carlisle, 2000; Casalis & Louis-Alexandre, 2000; Ku & Anderson, 2003; Li, Anderson, Nagy & Zhang, 2002; McBride-Chang, Wagner, Muse, Chow & Shu, 2005; Saeigh-Haddad & Geva, 2008). It is possible that morphological awareness is particularly important for the reading of scripts that are less transparent in terms of spelling to sound correspondences, such as Chinese (cf. Ziegler & Goswami’s psycholinguistic grain size theory, 2006; see also Fowler & Liberman, 1995). The seemingly all-pervasive importance of morphological awareness is likely due to the central position in language structure occupied by morphology, at the interface of phonology, syntax, and semantics (Carlisle, 1995). Carlisle surmises that morphological awareness “may provide a more general index of metalinguistic capability than [awareness of] any one of these areas considered alone” (p. 192).

Morphological awareness builds on a language user’s ability to understand and accurately deploy morphologically complex forms, or their morphological competence. In general, more is known about the development of morphological competence than about the development of morphological awareness. With regard to the development of word formation, children start producing novel word forms between 18 months and 2 years of age (Clark, 2001; Tager-Flusberg & Zukowski, 2009). In English, conversion appears first, followed by root compounding, and finally derivational affixation. In Chinese, root compounding is a very important way of forming complex words, and can thus be expected to emerge early. Following these early developments, both derivation and compounding become much more apparent between ages 3 and 4 (Clark, 2001) but keep developing and being refined well into the school years.

Morphological awareness emerges in the preschool years and is significantly enhanced by overt instruction in the initial years of formal education (Carlisle, 1995). It develops in a piecemeal fashion, with the ability to decompose words into their constituent morphemes preceding the ability to identify their meanings and grammatical implications (Carlisle & Fleming, 2003) as well as constraints on their distribution (i.e. rules pertaining to what morphemes can be combined; Tyler & Nagy, 1989). School-aged children show good understanding of the structure of simple noun-noun compounds (McBride-Chang, Cheung, Chow Chow & Choi, 2006; McBride-Chang, Shu, Zhou, Wat & Wagner, 2003), although the understanding of compounds that also include other word classes, such as adjectives or verbs, appears to develop more gradually (Anglin, 1993; Nagy, Berninger & Abbott, 2006). Awareness of derivational morphology, on the other hand, continues to develop throughout the elementary and middle school years, and with considerable individual variation (Carlisle & Fleming, 2003).

The present study focused on one particular aspect of morphological awareness in Chinese, homophone awareness, which is the ability to distinguish between a morpheme and its homophones in compound words. Compounding is the most important way of forming words in Chinese. Over 70% of the Chinese words are bimorphemic disyllabic compounds (Institute of Language Teaching and Research, 1986). In Chinese, a morpheme is generally represented by one syllable in the oral language and one character in the written language. Chinese morphemes are very productive. A morpheme forms about 17 compound words on average(Yin, 1984). For example, 公 (gong; male) appears in 公猪 gongzhu; (male pig: boar), 公羊 gongyang; (male sheep: ram), and 公鸡 gongji (male chicken: rooster). Chinese compounds are phonologically transparent. The phonology of constituent morphemes rarely changes in Chinese word formation (Ku & Anderson, 2003). These features may explain why, compared to their Englishspeaking counterparts, Chinese children seem to rely more on morphological analysis when learning new words (Shu, Anderson & Zhang, 1995).

Homophonous morphemes are very common in Chinese. There are approximately 5000 morphemes in daily use in Mandarin (Yin, 1984), but there are only less than 1300 syllables. According to Tang (1995), 68.5% of the syllables correspond to two or more morphemes. Because Chinese has a large number of homophones, to comprehend meaning properly in the spoken language, children must distinguish between morphemes that sound identical. Likewise, in reading, children must distinguish between characters that have the same pronunciation but different visual forms and meanings. A growing body of research has linked morphological awareness to reading success in Chinese children (Chen, Hao, Geva, Zhu & Shu, 2009; Chung & Hu, 2007; Li, et al., 2002; Liu & McBrideChang, 2010; McBride-Chang et al., 2003, 2005, 2006). In particular, two studies have examined the relationship between the ability to identify homophonic morphemes and reading in Chinese children. (Li et al., 2002; McBride-Chang et al., 2003). Li and colleagues (2002) designed a morpheme discrimination task, which orally presented first grade children with three disyllabic words, for example , 红茶 hongcha; (black tea), 绿茶 lücha; (green tea), and 检查 jiancha;(to examine), and asked them to judge which homophone had a different meaning. Li et al. found that the construct of morphological awareness, formed by a group of tasks including the morpheme discrimination task, made a greater contribution to reading comprehension than phonological awareness. McBride-Chang and coworkers (2003) used a task similar to Li and colleagues (2002), but with the support of pictures. For example, the child was orally given a two-syllable word laam lui; (boy and girl) containing a target morpheme (laam), and was asked to choose, among three pictures, a basketball (laam kou), a boy (laam hai), or the color blue (laam cik), the one that best corresponded to the meaning of that morpheme. Their task significantly predicted character reading in kindergarten but not in second grade because of performance ceiling effects.

The present study examines two factors that affect the development of morphological awareness in general and homophone awareness specifically: semantic relatedness and morpheme type. Semantic relatedness is the semantic proximity or distance between two words. Thus, the words headscarf and headband are closely semantically related, whereas the words headscarf and headache are not, regardless of the fact that both words share the morpheme head. In Chinese, for example, the words 水杯 shuibei (water glass: glass) and水瓶 shuiping (water bottle: thermos bottle) are closely related semantically, whereas neither is closely related to the word 水泵 shuibeng; (water pump: pump) in meaning. Adult priming studies have demonstrated that semantic relatedness facilitates recognition of morphologically related words under certain priming conditions (Feldman, 2000; Feldman & Soltano, 1999; Feldman, Soltano, Pastizzo & Francis, 2004; Monsell, 1985). For example, Feldman and colleagues(2004) observed that decision latencies to visual targets (e.g. casualness) were faster after semantically closely related primes (e.g. casually) than semantically more remotely related primes (e.g. casualty) when primes were presented auditorily and in immediate succession to the targets. Sandra (1990) found that the recognition of a compound was facilitated by a prime that was semantically related to one of its roots, but only when the prime was also related to the whole compound (e.g. in English, couch might prime armchair, but not chairperson). In two studies, Marslen-Wilson and Zhou found that English compounds primed each other when they were semantically closely related as wholes (e.g. teacup/ teapot), but not when they were not (e.g. headscarf/headache), both when presented auditorily and visually, with or without masking (Marslen-Wilson & Zhou, 1996, cited in Zhou & Marslen-Wilson, 2000). It is important to note, however, that because lexical access in primed lexical decision tasks does not necessarily require conscious, metalinguistic focusing on word form (although it may), findings from such research can only tentatively be extended to the domain of morphological awareness. It remains for research directly concerned with morphological awareness, such as the present study, to examine the influence of semantic relatedness on morphological awareness.

Another factor that may affect the development of homophone awareness is morpheme type. Free morphemes are potentially independent words (red, help, etc.), whereas bound morphemes cannot be words in their own right (un-, -ness, geo-, etc.). There are also free morphemes, for example, 鱼 yu (fish), 山 shan(mountain), and 走 zou (walk), and bound morphemes, for example, 民 min (人民people), 劳 lao (劳动labor), and 护 hu (保护protect) in Chinese. Although the issue of the precise role of morphological decomposition (particularly with regard to bound morphemes) in lexical representation and processing is still unresolved(e.g. Marslen-Wilson, Tyler, Waksler & Older, 1994; McQueen & Cutler, 2001; Vannest & Boland, 1999), it is reasonable to assume that free morphemes are more likely to be processed as separate units and receive more activation in language use. Because free morphemes can function as independent words as well as parts of compounds, they must be represented at both the morphemic and lexical levels in the mental lexicon (Shimomura, 1999; Zwitserlood, 1994). Bound morphemes, on the other hand, can only be expected to have separate representations at the morphemic level. In the same vein, awareness of free morphemes can develop either independently or through decomposition of morphologically complex words, whereas awareness of bound morphemes can only develop through the latter route. Thus, the awareness of free morphemes is expected to develop before the awareness of bound morphemes.

We admit that a number of other properties of morphemes apart from the two described here are likely to play a role in homophone awareness. Our decision to focus on semantic relatedness and morpheme type was not only based on our interests but also motivated by these two factors having received the most attention in the on-line processing literature on Mandarin, whereas other factors, such as neighborhood size and meaning relations, are only beginning to be investigated now. Moreover, an investigation of neighborhood size and thematic relations would require corpus data, which are not yet available in Chinese. Thus, we believe that it is reasonable to build on the understanding of homophone awareness in Chinese by studying two factors whose role in on-line processing is relatively well understood (see, e.g. Dronjic, 2011; Myers, 2007).

The present study takes a development perspective: we looked at the development of homophone awareness in Chinese children from kindergarten to Grade 3. The available research sheds little light on the development of morphological awareness among Chinese children, because most studies have either included participants from one single grade (McBride-Chang et al., 2005; 2006), or have not analyzed grade differences (Li et al., 2002; McBride-Chang et al., 2003). An exception is Ku and Anderson (2003), who addressed the development of awareness of compound morphology and derivational morphology in a crosscultural study of Chinese and American children. The study showed that children from both language backgrounds made large gains from Grade 2 to Grade 6 in written tasks that required them to recognize the morphological structure of words and identify the meaning of morphemes. However, because this study only used written tasks with children in the second grade and beyond, it remains unclear how morphological awareness develops in the oral language among younger children.

Our study consisted of two experiments. Experiment 1 was a cross-sectional experiment that included kindergartners from beginning (average age 3 years, 10 months [3;10]), intermediate (5;0), and senior (5;10) classes. Experiment 2 was a 7-month longitudinal investigation that followed two cohorts of children from the spring semester of Grades 1 and 2 to the fall semester of Grades 2 and 3. In combination, the two experiments examined the development of homophone awareness from the beginning year of kindergarten to Grade 3. In both experiments, homophone awareness was assessed with a morphological judgment task, which asked the participants to segment a compound word into its constituent parts, and to discriminate between cases where two compounds shared the same morpheme and cases where words contained homophonous morphemes. We chose to use this task for several reasons. First, the morphological judgment task examined morpheme identification and homophone discrimination, which was the focus of our study. Second, the morphological judgment task allowed us to examine multiple factors (age, semantic relatedness, morpheme type) with the same task. Third, the morphological judgment task was a receptive task rather than a production task, and as such, may be more suitable for younger children. Similar morphological judgment tasks had been used in previous studies (Li et al., 2002; McBride-Chang et al., 2003). We improved the task by adding the low semantic relatedness condition, and varying the status of the target morpheme (free vs. bound).

Based on previous research (e.g. Li et al., 2002; McBride-Chang et al., 2003; Tyler & Nagy, 1989), we hypothesized that children’s ability to identify and distinguish between homophonic morphemes would begin to develop in kindergarten years and would increase with age. Furthermore, we expected that both semantic relatedness and morpheme type would be related to the development of homophone awareness, as both factors would influence children’s ability to identify a morpheme from compound words. With respect to semantic relatedness, we predicted that children would be more likely to judge that two words shared the same morpheme in the high semantic relatedness condition when the meanings of the words were similar. Another prediction was that children would perform better with free morphemes than with bound morphemes. However, it remained open how the impacts of semantic relatedness and morpheme type would interact with each other, and with age/grade level.