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L1 Orthography in L2 Chinese Morphological Awareness: An Investigation of Alphabetic and Abugida Readers

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Abstract

The current study aimed to explore the effect of first language (L1) orthography on second language (L2) Chinese morphological awareness. One hundred and twenty-nine students (61 L1 English readers and 68 L1 Thai readers) who studied Chinese as a second language participated in this study. They completed four tasks of morphological awareness (morpheme segmentation, morpheme discrimination, compound structure discrimination, compound structure analysis) and two control measures (reading vocabulary tasks). Drawing upon MANCOVA analysis, the study revealed that Thai readers outperformed English readers on compound awareness after the effect of L2 reading vocabulary was accounted for. The study suggests that L1 orthographic differences and similarities (e.g. interword boundary) may affect word identification, thus contributing to morphological processing of Chinese compound words. The study provided empirical evidence to support cross-language influence in morphological processing of a non-alphabetic language.

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Notes

  1. 儿-er may be the exception.

  2. Reliability scores were from a prior study based on a sample of 171 participants (Zhang 2016).

  3. L2 reading vocabulary is the composite score of word-meaning knowledge and character knowledge.

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Acknowledgements

The study was sponsored by the Peak Discipline Construction Project of Education at East China Normal University, Shanghai Pujiang Program (Grant No.: 18PJC035), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No.: 41300-20101-222192; 41300-20101-222154).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Education, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

    Haomin Zhang

  2. Department of English, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

    Haomin Zhang

  3. The Foreign Language Teaching and Research Center, School of Foreign Languages, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

    Haomin Zhang

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  1. Haomin Zhang
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Correspondence to Haomin Zhang.

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The author certifies that he has no affiliations with or involvement in any organization or entity with any financial interest (such as honoraria; educational grants; participation in speakers’ bureaus; membership, employment, consultancies, stock ownership, or other equity interest; and expert testimony or patent-licensing arrangements), or non-financial interest (such as personal or professional relationships, affiliations, knowledge or beliefs) in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. The study has been approved by the IRB office of Carnegie Mellon University (Protocol number: HS14-294).

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Zhang, H. L1 Orthography in L2 Chinese Morphological Awareness: An Investigation of Alphabetic and Abugida Readers. J Psycholinguist Res 48, 117–127 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-018-9593-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-018-9593-4

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