What's in a Word? Morphological Awareness and Vocabulary Knowledge in Three Languages.

Morphological awareness in the form of lexical compounding and its relationship to vocabulary knowledge among children was investigated in this study. Due to the highly productive lexical compounding structure in Chinese and Korean, words in the two languages tend to be relatively morphologically transparent (i.e., the meanings of the words are easily accessible from their component characters). Therefore, knowing how to compound words may actually help children in their acquisition of vocabulary. Also, with more vocabulary, children are more likely to be aware of the morphological rules behind the language, hence improving their morphological awareness. In the study, a total of 663 five to six year-old children from Hong Kong, Beijing and Korea were tested twice on morphological awareness, vocabulary knowledge, and nonverbal reasoning, as well as phonological skills. Results confirm the hypothesis that early morphological awareness is predictive of later vocabulary knowledge in all three languages, even after considering the effect of early vocabulary knowledge. Early vocabulary knowledge is predictive of later morphological awareness in the same way. The bidirectional relationship between morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge can therefore be confirmed. The results suggested a possible way to test for potential difficulties in vocabulary acquisition by using this type of morphological awareness task. Educators who wish to boost children's vocabulary knowledge can also try to arouse their awareness of the morphological structure of their language. ¡@

 

McBride-Chang, C., Tardif, T., Cho, J.-R., Shu, H., Fletcher, P., Stokes, S. F., Wong, A., & Leung, K.-W. (2008). What's in a Word? Morphological Awareness and Vocabulary Knowledge in Three Languages. Applied Psycholinguistics, 29, 437-462.