The role of statistical learning in Chinese children's morphological awareness

Abstract

In our daily life, when we hear a new word, we can understand its meaning on the basis of word-building rules. This process involves analyzing morphemes and the relation between them and is referred to as morphological awareness (Ku & Anderson, 2003). In Chinese, morphemes have a certain degree of structures; for example, the words “花生油 (peanut oil)” and “芝麻油 (sesame oil)” share the same structure of “raw material + product.” However, only a limited number of studies have examined the learning mechanism that affects morphological awareness. In psycholinguistics, statistical learning, an implicit learning mechanism, has been found to help children and adults implicitly learn language by detecting its structures or rules (e.g., Arciuli & Simpson, 2012; Conway et al., 2010). It is possible that children unconsciously acquire morpheme rules and form their morphological awareness using statistical learning in their daily communication. To address this hypothesis, two studies were conducted to investigate the role of statistical learning in the morphological awareness of kindergarten and primary school Chinese students.

Study 1 contained three correlational studies conducted in the same group of kindergarten children at different ages in Hong Kong. Study 1.1 involved 135 kindergarteners in K2 (kindergarten second grade), aiming to develop a measure of visual statistical learning and examine the role of visual statistical learning in K2 children’s morphological awareness. I found no relation between visual statistical learning and morphological awareness, which might be due to a few issues I identified in the test of visual statistical learning. Based on 131 K3 (kindergarten third grade) children, Study 1.2 aimed to address the issues and further examine the role of visual statistical learning in K3 children’s compounding morphological awareness and homophone awareness, both of which were in an oral form. Results showed that visual statistical learning was not associated with compounding morphological awareness or homophone awareness. To address the possibility of a domain-specific account in which oral morphological awareness might be influenced by auditory statistical learning but not visual statistical learning, Study 1.3 examined the role of visual and auditory statistical learning in K3 children’s compounding morphological awareness and homophone awareness. With the same group of children as Study 1.1 and Study 1.2, the results of Study 1.3 showed that neither visual nor auditory statistical learning was associated with compounding morphological awareness or homophone awareness.

Study 2 was a correlational study with 44 primary school students in Hong Kong and aimed to examine the role of visual and auditory statistical learning in primary school students’ morphological awareness. Results showed that visual and auditory statistical learning were unrelated to morphological awareness.

The present research was the first of its kind to explore the association between statistical learning and Chinese morphological awareness. I have offered several explanations for our null results and discussed a few directions for future research.

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