Morphological awareness uniquely predicts young children's Chinese character recognition

Two unique measures of morphological awareness, along with other reading-related tasks, were orally administered to 100 kindergarten and 100 2nd-grade Hong Kong Chinese children. These morphological awareness tasks were developed on the basis of 2 special properties of Chinese: (a) the relatively large number of homophones requires speakers to distinguish unique meanings in syllables with identical sounds, and (b) complex vocabulary words are often built from 2 or more previously learned morphemes. Both tasks of morphological awareness predicted unique variance in Chinese character recognition in these children, after controlling for age, phonological awareness, speeded naming, speed of processing, and vocabulary. Developmentally, both tasks of morphological awareness improved with age. Results demonstrate that morphological awareness is uniquely important for early Chinese character recognition.