The development of morphological processing in reading Chinese

Abstract

Morphological awareness is important for the development of reading. Base on the studies of morphological processing in reading, three processing models were proposed: the Interactive Constituency Model (Tan & Perfetti, 1999), Taft, Liu, & Zhu’s (1999) Interactive-Activation Model (hereafter referred to as the IAM model) and the processing model suggested by Zhou & MarslenWilson (2000). The constructions of these three processing models are similar in that they all assume a triangular relation between orthography, phonology and semantics, and that both whole-word and decomposed processing are involved in decoding complex words. They also have similar predictions in terms of the accuracy and latency of decoding morphologically complex words of different frequency levels and morphological productivity. In contrast, the IAM model is the most distinctive in (1) predicting that free morphemes facilitate word recognition, and (2) proposing a mechanism of development based on print exposure. The aim of the current study is to verify these two distinctive features of the IAM model. To achieve this, two steps were involved. The first step is the establishment of a data corpus of primary school Chinese words with morphological analysis which allows careful control of morphological properties, including word and morphemic frequencies, boundness and productivity, of stimuli in a developmental perspective. The second step is that children from Grade 2, 4 & 6 were recruited to read frequency-controlled bi-morphemic Chinese words with different boundness and productivity. Results showed that significant boundness effect and productivity effects were observed in Grade 6 which is comparable with the performance predictions of the IAM model. Results from Grade 2 & 4 not only support the developmental mechanism proposed by the model but also provide insightful information on the development of boundness awareness. Theoretical and educational implications were discussed. References Taft, M., Liu, Y., & Zhu, X. (1999). Morphemic Processing in Reading Chinese. In J. Wang, A. Inhoff & H.-C. Chen (Eds.), Reading Chinese Scripts: A cognitive analysis (pp. 91-114). N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Tan, L. H., & Perfetti, C. A. (1999). Phonological activation in visual identification of Chinese twocharacter words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 25(2), 382-393. Zhou, X., & Marslen-Wilson, W. (2000). Lexical representation of compound words: Cross-linguistic evidence. Psychologia, 43, 47-66.