2. Experiment 1

2.1 Method

2.1.1 Participants

The participants were 114 children from a kindergarten in Beijing. There were 39 children (21 boys, 18 girls) in the beginning class, 39 children (21 boys, 18 girls) in the intermediate class, and 36 children in the senior class (21 boys, 15 girls). The average ages were 3;10, 5;0, and 5;10, respectively. All the children were native speakers of Chinese and did not have any obvious cognitive or developmental delays.

2.1.2 Materials and procedure

The morphological judgment task used in this experiment adopted the same format as the morpheme identification test in McBride-Chang and colleagues(2003). The experimenter showed the child three pictures and named each picture for the child. The child was then given a compound word containing the target morpheme. The experimenter pointed out that although all three picture-names shared a common syllable, only the syllable in one picture-name had the same meaning as the target morpheme; the other two were homophones. The child was asked to select the picture-name that best corresponded to the meaning of the target morpheme. For example, in one item, the picture-names were 带鱼daiyu (belt fish: hairtail), 袋鼠 daishu (pocket mouse: kangaroo), and 大夫 daifu(doctor), and the word containing the target morpheme was口袋 koudai (mouth pocket: pocket). 袋鼠 daishu was the correct answer for this item because the 袋dai in this word represented the same morpheme as the 袋 dai in 口袋 koudai. All words used in this experiment were concrete words that can be easily represented by pictures.

The morphological judgment task consisted of 20 items. The task adopted a 2 (Semantic Relatedness: High Vs. Low) x 2 (Morpheme Type: Free Vs. Bound) design, with five items in each cell. The items are presented in Appendix A. The number of items was relatively small because it was difficult to create items that met all the selection criteria. Different types of items were mixed together and administered individually in a randomized order in a quiet room by a trained graduate student majoring in psychology. The reliability (α) of the morphological judgment task was 0.95.

SEMANTIC RELATEDNESS. The test items were divided into two levels of semantic relatedness, with 10 items in each condition. In the high semantic relatedness condition, the two words sharing the same morpheme in each item were closely related in meaning as whole words, for example, 象棋 xiangqi(elephant chess: chess) and 跳棋 tiaoqi (jump chess: checkers). In the low semantic relatedness condition, the two words sharing the same morpheme were distant in meaning as whole words, for example, 耳机 erji (ear machine: headphone) and 飞机 feiji (flying machine: plane). Twenty psychology majors at Beijing Normal University evaluated the semantic relatedness of the items on a 7-point scale, where 1 = extremely low semantic relatedness and 7 = extremely high semantic relatedness. Specifically, they were asked to judge how closely the two morpheme-sharing words in each item were related in meaning as whole words. The average rating of items of high semantic relatedness was 4.40, and the average rating of items of low semantic relatedness was 2.50. The difference between the two types of items was highly significant, t (9) = 3.37, p < 0.01.

MORPHEME TYPE. Within each semantic relatedness condition, the target morphemes in half of the items were free, for example, 棋 in 象棋 and 跳棋, and the target morphemes in the other half were bound, for example, 机 in 耳机 and飞机. Morpheme type was rated on a 3-point scale adopted from Chen and Zheng(2000), where 1 = a morpheme is always free, 2 = a morpheme is sometimes free, 3= a morpheme is always bound. The target morphemes received consistent ratings from all the evaluators, either as free morphemes or bound morphemes.

ITEM FAMILIARITY. Only words familiar to our participants in spoken language were included in the morphological judgment task. Familiarity was determined based on two corpora of Chinese preschoolers’ spoken vocabulary that the first author created (Hao, Shu, Xing & Li, 2008; Hao, Shu & Xing, 2011). The first corpus (Hao et al., 2008) contained spoken vocabulary of Chinese infants and toddlers, and the second one (Hao et al., 2011) included spoken vocabulary of young Chinese children aged between 3 and 6 years old. In addition, participants’teachers confirmed that all the items were familiar to the children in oral language. None of the children received systematic character instruction in this kindergarten.

2.2 Results and Discussion

The descriptive statistics are displayed in Table 1. Six outliers that were 2 standard deviations below the mean were removed from the data analysis. As shown in Table 1, beginning kindergartners’ performance was close to the chance level (33%) in the low semantic relatedness condition. Intermediate kindergartners’performance was also close to the chance level in the low semantic relatedness condition, but only when the target morpheme was bound. In general, the children scored higher in the high semantic relatedness condition than in the low semantic relatedness condition, higher on free morphemes than on bound morphemes. Their performance also increased with age.

Table 1. Mean proportion (standard deviation) as a function of semantic relatedness, morpheme type, and age in Experiment 1

A 2 (Semantic Relatedness) x 2 (Morpheme Type) x 3 (Age) repeated-measure analysis of variance was carried out to analyze the data. Semantic relatedness and morpheme type were within-subject factors, and age was a between-subject factor. There was a very strong effect of semantic relatedness, F (1, 105) = 183.15, p < .001, η2 = 0.636, suggesting that this factor has a large impact on morpheme identification in the kindergarten years. Thus, it is much easier for young children to identify a morpheme when words sharing this morpheme are closely related in meaning. The children’s age was also a significant factor, F (2, 105) = 13.06, p <.001, η2 = 0.199, pointing to continuous development of homophone awareness in kindergartner years. However, the interaction between semantic relatedness and age was not significant (see Figure 12). This lack of interaction suggests that there is no accelerated development in the ability to identify shared morphemes in semantically dissimilar words in the kindergarten years.

Fig. 1. The development of homophone awareness in high and low levels of semantic relatedness with age/grade level. K1, K2, K3, beginning, intermediate, and senior class in kindergarten, respectively; P1, P2, younger and older cohort in primary school, respectively.

We also observed a significant main effect of morpheme type, F (1, 105)= 7.80, p < .01, η2 = 0.069. This finding confirms our hypothesis that young children are more aware of free morphemes than bound morphemes. The interaction between type of morpheme and age approached significance in this experiment, F (2, 105) = 2.79, p = .066, η2 = 0.050. In the beginning kindergarten class, children were very young and showed a low level of awareness of both free morphemes and bound morphemes. Performance on free morphemes improved from the beginning class to the intermediate class (Mdn = 0.13, p < .01). Awareness of bound morphemes, on the other hand, did not change significantly from the beginning class to the intermediate class. These findings offer preliminary evidence that the awareness of free morphemes develops before the awareness of bound morphemes. Awareness of bound morphemes improved significantly from the intermediate class to the senior class (Mdn = 0.12, p < .01). In senior kindergarten, children achieved similar levels of performance on both free and bound morphemes, probably due to the fact that the task was relatively easy and thus was not sensitive enough to differentiate between the two types of items. This marginally significant interaction is portrayed in Figure 2.

Fig. 2. The development of the awareness of free and bound morphemes with age/grade level.

The interaction between type of morpheme and semantic relatedness was not significant (see Figure 3); neither was the three-way interaction among type of morpheme, semantic relatedness, and age. In other words, the gap between the performance in the low semantic relatedness condition and that in the high semantic relatedness condition remained large regardless of morpheme type across all three kindergarten classes. The lack of interactions provides converging evidence that semantic relatedness is the predominant factor at this stage of the development of homophone awareness.

Fig. 3. The relationship between the type of morpheme and semantic relatedness.