Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rmla20
Download by: [71.112.84.92] Date: 26 November 2015, At: 20:36
Language Awareness
ISSN: 0965-8416 (Print) 1747-7565 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmla20
Cross-linguistic transfer of morphological
awareness between Chinese and English
Sihui Ke & Feng Xiao
To cite this article: Sihui Ke & Feng Xiao (2015) Cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness between Chinese and English, Language Awareness, 24:4, 355-380
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658416.2015.1114624
Published online: 26 Nov 2015.
Submit your article to this journal
View related articles
Cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness between
Chinese and English
Sihui Ke a*and Feng Xiao b
a
Department of Modern Languages, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA; b
Department of Asian Languages and Literatures, Pomona College, 550 N. Harvard Ave, Claremont, CA 91711, USA
(Received 25 January 2015; accepted 22 October 2015)
Substantial biliteracy research on two alphabetic languages has indicated that, once it is fostered in the first language (L1) literacy experience, morphological awareness can transfer and facilitate second language (L2) reading. It is still unclear, however, whether L1 metalinguistic awareness transfers in the same manner across typologically different languages, and to what extent and under what conditions transfer occurs. This paper synthesises eight studies on the transfer of morphological awareness between Chinese and English. Three questions guided this research: (1) how was morphological awareness defined and measured in prior work; (2) what are the patterns of transfer between the two languages; and (3) what are the factors that affect such transfer effects? The findings have shown a lack of consistency in measuring morphological awareness in existing studies; there were small-to-moderate correlations between L1 and L2 morphological awareness in Chinese English bilingual reading development; and L2 exposure and task demands were shown to have notable impacts on the cross-linguistic transfer. It is suggested that much needs to be done to expand our understanding of how morphological awareness functions as a sharable resource in bilingual reading development.
Keywords:morphological awareness; transfer; biliteracy; second language reading; cross-linguistic
Introduction
Morphological awareness refers to the ability to analyse a word’s morpheme constituents in visual word processing for the purpose of meaning construction (Carlisle,1995,2000; see also Kuo & Anderson,2006, 2008). Recently, an increasing amount of bilingual reading research in alphabetic languages has indicated that once it is fostered in first language (L1) literacy experience, morphological awareness can transfer and facilitate subsequent reading skills development (e.g. Deacon, Wade-Woolley, & Kirby,2007; Kieffer & Lesaux,2008; Ramirez, Chen, & Pasquarella,2013). However, questions that remain are whether L1 mor-phological awareness transfers in the same manner across different languages, to what extent transfer effects can facilitate the formation of second language (L2) morphological awareness, and under what conditions transfer occurs (Koda, 2005, 2008). Focusing on Chinese reading and alphabetic (English) reading, this review will provide implications for universal and language-specific aspects in the development of morphological awareness in reading acquisition (see also McBride,2015; Perfetti, Cao, & Booth,2013). Specifically, it documents a synthesis of (1) how morphological awareness has been defined and measured
*Corresponding author. Email:ske@andrew.cmu.edu
Ó2015 Taylor & Francis
Language Awareness, 2015
Vol. 24, No. 4, 355 380, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658416.2015.1114624
across two typologically distinct languages (i.e. Chinese and English); (2) what the patterns of transfer are between the two languages in bilingual reading development; and (3) what factors can affect such transfer effects.
Background
Morphological awareness and reading development
Morphological awareness and phonological awareness are two major components of metalinguistic awareness. Metalinguistic awareness refers to the ability to identify, analyse, and manipulate language forms (Koda,2007, p. 2). As such, learning to read is fundamen-tally metalinguistic because it involves the ability to map form onto meaning (Mattingly, 1984; Nagy & Anderson, 1995). As proposed by the universal grammar of reading (Perfetti,2003), all writing systems encode spoken languages (phonology and morphology). Previous research has found that, independent of phonological awareness, morphological awareness contributes to reading comprehension (e.g. Carlisle, 2000; Kieffer & Lesaux, 2008), because morphological awareness entails sensitivity to semantic, phonological, and syntactic properties, and is a more ‘general index of metalinguistic capability’ than phono-logical awareness alone in examining learning to read (Carlisle,1995, p. 192). Also, mor-phological awareness is related closely to a range of important reading subskills at the word level, such as decoding, spelling, word identification, and lexical inferencing (guess-ing unknown word mean(guess-ings) (Nagy, Carlisle, & Goodwin,2014; Verhoeven & Carlisle, 2006). In a recent review, Nagy et al. (2014) expressed the view that the importance of morphological awareness in the development of reading subskills can be accounted for by experiences with morphologically complex words, particularly with unfamiliar words made up of familiar morphemes, which thus contributes to the quality of lexical representations in memory (see also, lexical quality hypothesis in Perfetti, 2007; Perfetti & Hart,2002). These experiences range from decoding or spelling new words by segmenting them into morpheme constituents, to guessing the meanings of unknown morphologically complex words based on familiar word parts, and to inferring the part of speech of a new word on the basis of a suffix in the case of reading (in English).
Although the extant literature generally agrees upon the unique contributions of mor-phological awareness to reading subskills development, there have been heterogeneous conceptualisations, operationalisations, and assessments of morphological awareness. One possible reason is that morphological awareness is a complex, multifaceted con-struct, consisting of a set of abilities, ranging from the ability to analyse a word into its morphological constituents, to the skills to use morphological information to identify the grammatical categorisation of a word, and to sensitivity to the constraints on morpheme concatenation (Tyler & Nagy,1989). Another reason is that there is still a lack of consis-tency between its definition and assessment, as well as researchers’ claims related to this construct and how it functions in reading development (Apel,2014). A third reason can be related to the difficulty in dissecting morphological awareness frommorphological processing(the tacit use of morphology). Nagy et al. (2014) pointed out that measures of morphological awareness must draw upon both explicit (awareness) and tacit use of mor-phology (processing), and thus used the termmorphological knowledgeas an overarching term that covers morphological awareness and morphological processing. They also noted that ‘it isn’t clear to what extent individual differences in morphological awareness reflect differences in awareness and to what extent they reflect differences in (tacit) morphologi-cal processing’ (p. 4). Following this processing view of morphologimorphologi-cal awareness, researchers may find it difficult to interpret previous research findings as to which 356 S. Ke and F. Xiao
component skill, morphological awareness or tacit linguistic knowledge (including mor-phology), or the interaction of the two, makes unique contributions to different aspects of reading development such as the ability to infer unknown word meanings during reading using word-internal morphological information and word-external contextual informa-tion. The former relies on morphological awareness whereas the latter depends on tacit linguistic knowledge (see Mori & Nagy,1999). Still others have made efforts to distin-guish the two and examined the relationship between morphological awareness and tacit linguistic knowledge in reading development (Koda, 2007, and Koda, L€u, & Zhang, 2014). Guided by the componential view of reading (Carr & Levy,1990), Koda (2007) proposed that reading abilities or competencies encompass metalinguistic awareness (the ability to identify, analyse, and manipulate language forms), linguistic knowledge (e.g. vocabulary and grammar), and reading subskills (e.g. decoding, word identification, and lexical inferencing). In her model, she viewed metalinguistic awareness (including mor-phological awareness) as an explicit representation of the abstract structure of language, which is less language-specific and, therefore, less affected by linguistic knowledge. Most recently, Koda et al. (2014) proposed that different facets of morphological aware-ness impose different linguistic demands. Morphological awareaware-ness can be categorised into less language-specific facets (e.g. the ability to segment words into constituent mor-phemes and the structural relations between constituent mormor-phemes) and more language-specific facets (e.g. the knowledge of the function of productive morphemes, like affixes in English, and the competence to discriminate meanings of base words). Therefore, the less language-specific facets of morphological awareness necessitate minimal use of lin-guistic knowledge of the target language, whereas the more language-specific facets of morphological awareness entail greater linguistic demands. As an illustration, in a study with Grade six Chinese-speaking children of L2 English, Zhang and Koda (2013) mea-sured the two categories of morphological awareness in English. The less language-spe-cific facet of morphological awareness was measured by two tasks that asked children to identify the structural relation between morpheme components a morpheme relation task for derived words and a compound structure task for compounds. Sample questions include ‘Does teacher come from teach?’ for the former, and ‘Which is a better name for a bee that lives in the grass: a grass bee or a bee grass?’ for the latter. The more language-specific facet of morphological awareness was measured by an affix choice task and a morpheme discrimination task. The affix choice task required children to select an appro-priate affix to fill in a blank in a sentence; the morpheme discrimination task tested child-ren’s understanding that a word part shared by print words might carry different meanings. They found that the children’s performance on the less language-specific facet tasks was significantly better than their performance on the more language-specific ones, suggesting that the former are less constrained by L2 linguistic knowledge.
The distinction between morphological awareness and tacit linguistic knowledge in rela-tion to reading development is crucial in the research and teaching of bilingual reading, espe-cially when it involves bilingual readers who have developed morphological awareness in their L1 and vary in their L2 linguistic knowledge. In the research domain, a few vantage points are offered: to examine which facet(s) of morphological awareness are transferred and to what extent it facilitates the development of various kinds of reading subskills; to investi-gate the potential interrelationship between morphological awareness and linguistic knowl-edge in contributing to reading skills development; and to provide reliable diagnostic feedback for second language practitioners with respect to the cause(s) of individual differen-ces in L2 learning and reading development (see also Alderson, Brunfaut, & Harding,2015). As to teaching, by differentiating more language-specific and less language-specific facets of Language Awareness 357
morphological awareness, teachers can adjust their tasks to meet the needs of students at dif-ferent developmental stages of L2 linguistic knowledge. More important, children’s prior language and literacy experiences should be valued by teachers because strengthening child-ren’s L1 morphological awareness might improve their L2 morphological awareness recipro-cally and benefit L2 reading development subsequently.
Cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness
The term transfer can be used to describe ‘cross language relationships found in structures that belong exclusively to the linguistic domain (e.g. phonology), as well as skills that involve cognitive and language abilities (e.g. reading comprehension)’ (Genesee, Geva, Dressler, & Kamil,2006, p. 157). We focus on the latter when attending to the role of mor-phological awareness in biliteracy development. In a review of L1 reading and biliteracy research involving eight languages (Chinese, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Hebrew, Ital-ian, and Spanish), Verhoeven and Perfetti (2011) suggested that ‘[there might be a univer-sal morphology principle since morphological knowledge] is univeruniver-sally part of reading, subject to the constraints of the language and how the writing system encodes that language’ (p. 465). In other words, morphological awareness should be a sharable resource across languages in reading development. As well, prior studies from the cross-linguistic perspective varied in their research foci. There were three major lines of research: one line of research analysed and compared the same construct of morphological awareness between different L1s (e.g. Ku & Anderson, 2003; McBride-Chang et al., 2008). The second line compared metalinguistic capabilities between monolingual readers and bilingual readers to see if there were any beneficial effects from reader’s bilin-gual or biliteracy experiences on the development of metalinguistic awareness (e.g. Kieffer, 2014; Kieffer & Lesaux, 2012). The third line of research examined the interrelationship between L1 morphological awareness and L2 reading subskills within a single group of bilingual readers (e.g. Wang, Yang, & Cheng, 2009; Zhang, 2013). The first two lines of research have provided important implications for cross-linguistic transfer, but they have not provided sufficient evidence on transfer effects (if any). The third line of research directly investigated the mechanism of transfer and factors that lead to individual variation within a particular group of bilingual readers. This approach can probe transfer effects by comparing the interre-lationship between L1 and L2 reading skills. Also, it is of interest to both research-ers and teachresearch-ers who are concerned with evidence-based practice and the maximisation of L1 and L2 resources available to L2 readers. With respect to the mechanism of transfer in bilingual reading development, Koda (2005, 2008) posited that transfer is an automatic activation of well-established L1 competencies triggered by L2 input. She also pointed out that it is crucial to conduct cross-linguistic analy-ses in any investigation of cross-linguistic transfer. Focusing on Chinese and English, the following section discusses the commonalities and differences in mor-phological awareness in the two languages.
Morphological awareness in Chinese1and English
To reiterate, morphological awareness is often referred to as the ability to analyse a word’s morpheme constituents in visual word processing (Carlisle,1995,2000; Kuo & Anderson,2006,2008). The development of this ability in a specific language reflects gra-pheme morgra-pheme mapping principles in that language (see Perfetti, 2003). The 358 S. Ke and F. Xiao
orthography of Chinese is morphosyllabic in that the basic grapheme unit is a character, which, in most cases, maps onto a morpheme that corresponds to a single syllable. While most characters have their own meanings and can be used independently, the combination of two or more characters can also form new words; yet the meaning of each component character can be either closely related or totally unrelated to the whole word meaning (Li & Thompson, 1981; as cited in Li & McBride-Chang, 2014). The orthography of English is morphophonemic, meaning that the basic grapheme unit is an alphabetic letter, and printed words represent both phonemic and morphemic information. When there is inconsistency in representing phonemes in English printed words, morphological infor-mation is still preserved (e.g. heal/health, cats/dogs, as cited in Frost,2012).
Since morphological awareness develops reciprocally with print exposure in the target language, previous research on monolingual reading development has indicated that, compared to other reading subskills (e.g. phonological awareness), morphological awareness plays a more important role in learning to read in Chinese than in learning to read in English because the morpheme boundary is more transparent in Chinese, with characters mapped onto morphemes at the syllable level, whereas the correspondence between morphemic information and orthographic phonological information is less reli-able in English. Moreover, an orthographic word is a salient unit in English, whereas word boundaries are not signalled clearly in Chinese orthography, and Chinese readers need to rely on their morphological skills to recognise words. For example, Lin et al. (2011) observed that L1 Chinese adults were more aware of the relative productivity of the character at the end of a word as a word boundary cue. Also, morphological awareness emerges relatively earlier in Chinese children (i.e. from kindergarten) and is a strong predictor of reading development in Chinese (e.g. Hao, Chen, Dronjic, Shu, & Anderson, 2013). On the other hand, morphological awareness in English might not make a signifi-cant contribution to reading development beyond phonological awareness until early elementary grades (e.g. Nagy, Berninger, & Abbott,2006).
Although cross-linguistic comparisons made between the two languages in monolin-gual readers have provided insights into the acquisition of morphological awareness in typologically different languages, it has not been until recent years that researchers have examined directly the commonalities and differences in morphological awareness in Chinese and English and the transfer effects in bilingual readers (e.g. Wang, Cheng, & Chen,2006; Wang, Yang, & Cheng, 2009; Zhang,2013). Such investigations were based mainly on the comparison across different word formation rules (i.e. inflection, derivation, and compounding) between the two languages (e.g. Yeh,2010). For instance, compound awareness is considered to be language-general since compounding is a morphological process shared between English and Chinese, whereas derivational awareness is considered to be specific to English and derivation is not as predominant as compounding according to linguistic analyses of Chinese (e.g. Packard,2000). Logic would suggest that it is more likely for a language-general facet of morphological awareness developed from one lan-guage to transfer and facilitate reading development in an additional lanlan-guage. However, how transfer occurs and what factors can affect cross-linguistic transfer are still unclear.
Altogether, the preceding review indicates that our understanding of morphological awareness as a valuable sharable resource in reading development across languages still needs to be expanded with regard to (1) how morphological awareness is defined, concep-tualised, and measured as a multifaceted construct in relation to reading development; (2) how morphological awareness develops and serves as a cross-linguistically sharable resource in bilingual reading development; and (3) what factors can influence the cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness.
Language Awareness 359
This synthesis examines how morphological awareness functions as a cross-linguisti-cally sharable resource in Chinese and English, by addressing three synthesis questions:
(1) How has morphological awareness been defined, conceptualised, and measured in bilingual reading development of Chinese and English?
(2) What are the patterns of transfer between the two languages? (3) What are the factors that affect the transfer effects?
Method
Two steps were followed to locate primary studies. First, four key words (morphological awareness, morphological knowledge, transfer, and reading) were combined and searched for in five databases: ERIC, LLBA, PsycINFO, Google Scholar, and Web of Science. Second, a manual search was conducted of research syntheses, narrative reviews, and pre-vious primary studies in referred journals and book chapters (e.g. Apel,2014; August & Shanahan,2006; Carlisle, McBride-Chang, Nagy, & Nunes,2010; Koda & Reddy,2008; Nagy et al.,2014). The first two steps generated 28 studies (till January 2015). Finally, eight primary studies (marked within References) were selected by referring to the fol-lowing inclusion and exclusion criteria: studies on transfer of morphological awareness between Chinese and English and published in English were included, while studies on readers with special language impairments or of an interventional nature as well as repeti-tive reports were excluded. As noted in a review of the effects of instruction in morpho-logical awareness on literacy achievement in L1, Carlisle et al. (2010) concluded that given the design and quality of existing studies, interventional research in this area is still immature. To our knowledge, it also holds for L2 reading.
Guided by the three synthesis questions, we coded the selected studies with reference to the characteristics of primary studies, features of morphological awareness measures, the correlation between L1 and L2 morphological awareness (indexed by Pearson’s r), and potential moderators (see Lee,2011). Generally speaking, the purposes of the primary studies were twofold: to investigate the cross-linguistic transfer effects of morphological awareness in Chinese English bilingual readers, and to investigate the relative contribu-tions of morphological awareness and other reading skills (e.g. phonological awareness) in bilingual reading development, as well as their intricate interrelationship. As indicated inTable 1, there are three characteristics shared across primary studies. First, the partici-pants in these studies had Chinese as their home language and English as an additional language. Second, all focused on reading development in younger children (kindergarten to Grade 6), with one exception that included adolescents from Grades 7 9 (i.e. Yeh, 2010). Third, all these studies adopted a cross-sectional design with a moderate-to-large sample size, ranging from 64 to 287. It should be noted that the participants in these stud-ies varied in their bilingual profiles: some were Chinese-dominant (ND5), while others were English-dominant with Chinese as a heritage language (ND3). Also, there were dif-ferent regional varieties of Chinese associated with the participants’ language back-grounds, such as Cantonese and Mandarin. Given the small sample size (N D 8), we considered an integrative review to be more appropriate than a meta-analysis.
Results and discussion
Definition, conceptualisation, and measurement of morphological awareness
As shown inTable 2, selected studies adopted Carlisle’s (1995) definition of morphologi-cal awareness, ‘children’s awareness of the morphemic structure of words and their 360 S. Ke and F. Xiao
Table 1. Summary of studies on cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness in Chinese English bilingual reading.
Study Purpose Participants Language profile
Age learning to read two writing systems simultaneously
Chinese-English bilingual children
English-dominant 10.5 1 4 64 Immediate (USA)
English-dominant 6.8 1 78 Immediate (USA)
Chinese-dominant 7.9 2 and 4 141 Foreign (Hong
English-dominant 7.8 1, 3 and 4 137 Immediate (Canada)
Cross-sectional
Yeh (2010) To examine morphological awareness transferring effects
Chinese-dominant NA 7 9 287 Foreign (Taiwan)
Cross-sectional
Zhang (2013) To investigate a
potential linguistic distance
Chinese-dominant 12.1 6 204 Foreign (mainland
Table 1. (Continued)
Study Purpose Participants Language profile
Age
(years) Grade
Sample size
Context of L2
learning Duration
Zhang and Koda (2014)
To examine the
intra-and inter-lingual relationships between L1 and L2
morphological awareness and reading comprehension
Chinese (Mandarin) English bilingual children
Chinese-dominant 12.1 6 245 Foreign (Mainland China)
Cross-sectional
Zhang, Koda, & Sun (2014)
To examine the contribution of morphological awareness to reading comprehension, and to further address whether there is any effect of linguistic distance and relative
proficiency of L1 and L2 on cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness in biliteracy development
Chinese (Mandarin) English bilingual children
Chinese-dominant 11.6 5 and 6 96 Foreign (Mainland China)
Cross-sectional
Note: K Kindergarten.
362
S.
Ke
and
F.
Xiao
Table 2. Summary of the definition and measurement of morphological awareness.
Study Definition Function(s) No. of measure(s)
Control variables and and their ability to reflect on and manipulate that structure
Somewhat analogous to the role of phonemic awareness in and their ability to perceive and manipulate that structure
Single in both L1 and L2
Age
Cheung et al. (2010). The recognition of and ability to manipulate the meaning structure of language
Involved in the more meaning-based domains of vocabulary and reading comprehension
Single in both L1 and L2
The ability to reflect upon and manipulate morphemes, the smallest phonological unit that carries meaning, and to use word formation rules to construct and understand
Yeh (2010) A child’s conscious awareness of the morphemic structure of words and their ability to reflect on and manipulate that structure
Table 2. (Continued)
Study Definition Function(s) No. of measure(s)
Control variables and measures
Zhang (2013) The ability to reflect upon and manipulate morphemes and employ word formation rules in one’s language
Facilitating segmentation of morphologically complex words and the retrieval and retention of these words; a basic competence for word learning in that meanings of unfamiliar words can be inferred by use of morphological analysis
Multiple in both L1 and L2
NA
Zhang and Koda (2014)
The ability to reflect upon and manipulate morphemes and the morphological structure of words
Analysing morphologically complex words into their meaningful components; Supportive of development of vocabulary knowledge and reading of words, and the inference of meanings of unfamiliar words
Multiple in both L1 and L2
Non-verbal
intelligence (Raven et al.,1998)
Zhang, Koda, and Sun (2014)
The ability to reflect upon and manipulate morphemes and morphological structure of words
Contributing to word reading; critical to inferring meanings of unknown complex words
Multiple in both L1 and L2
NA
364
S.
Ke
and
F.
Xiao
ability to reflect on and manipulate that structure’ (p. 199). Morphological structure referred to ‘the ways in which morphemes are conjoined in words’ (Koda,2000, p. 299). Since all were studies investigating the role of morphological awareness in bilingual read-ing development, they should have provided explanations for the way in which morpho-logical awareness contributed to reading development in bilingual readers. Surprisingly, only a few studies went beyond surface-level association between morphological aware-ness and reading subskills (e.g. decoding) and reasoned abouthowmorphological aware-ness served as an important predictor in bilingual (and monolingual) reading acquisition (e.g. Yeh, 2010; Zhang, 2013). Following prior work (Carlisle, 2000), Zhang (2013) pointed out that morphological awareness had two functions in relation to reading devel-opment: (1) facilitating segmentation of morphologically complex words and the retrieval and retention of these words; and (2) serving as a basic competence for inferring the meanings of unfamiliar words and learning new words.
When it comes to the operationalisation of morphological awareness, the primary studies varied in their specifics. Three studies used a single measure of morphological awareness in L1 and L2, respectively (i.e. Cheung et al.,2010; Pasquarella, Chen, Lam, & Luo,2011; Wang, Yang, & Cheng,2009), while five others used multiple measures. The use of multiple measures is more reliable because morphological awareness, by defi-nition, is multifaceted. Specifically, primary studies varied in the features of morphologi-cal awareness measures, including modes (i.e. spoken versus written), type of morphology, and parallels between L1 and L2 measures (as illustrated inTable 3). (1) Four of the studies presented morphological awareness tasks orally (i.e. Cheung et al., 2010; Pasquarella et al.,2011; Wang et al.,2006; Wang, Yang, & Cheng,2009); the other four used a written format, which should relate to the participants’ literacy exposure in that oral measures are more appropriate for children in kindergarten and early elementary grades. Among the oral tasks, the more frequently used ones with sample questions include: (a) Riddle guess:Which is a better name for a bee that lives in the grass: grass bee? Or bee grass? (b) Sentence completion:My uncle is a. (clue word: farm. Answer: farmer). (c) New word production: Early in the morning the sun comes up, and this is called sunrise. At night, we see the moon come up. What could we call this? (Answer: moonrise). (2) As for types of morphology, two studies (i.e. Wang, Yang, & Cheng, 2009; Zhang, Koda, & Sun,2014) directly examined the shared word formation rules between Chinese and English, focusing on compound awareness only, while six studies included both compound and derivational awareness. Among measures of derivational awareness, two were adopted: word relation (adapted from Nagy et al.,2006), and deri-vational composition and decomposition at the sentence level (adapted from Carlisle, 2000). The former requires readers to judge whether one word (e.g.teach) comes from the other (e.g.teacher); while the latter asks readers to fill in a blank in a sentence with a provided word (e.g.My uncle is a farmer, withfarmas the clue word). As for measures of compound awareness, the primary studies followed the lexical compounding task designed by McBride-Chang and her colleagues (2005) or the compound structure task used by Nagy et al. (2006). In the lexical compounding task, the participants produced a novel compound word based on a presented definition: Early in the morning the sun comes up, and this is called sunrise. At night, we see the moon come up. What could we call this? (Answer: moonrise). In the compound structure task, the participants chose an answer from a riddle with two options:Which is a better name for a bee that lives in the grass: grass bee? Or bee grass?
Only one study measured Chinese and English inflectional awareness (i.e. Yeh,2010). In the Chinese inflectional awareness task, the participants filled in a blank in a sentence Language Awareness 365
Table 3. Features of morphological awareness measurement.
Study Target populations Mode
Type of
morphology L1-L2 Operationalisation Sample item(s) Words
Wang, Cheng, and better name for a bee that lives in the grass: grass bee? Or bee grass?
(2)Sentence completion: my uncle is a. (clue word: farm)
Oral Compound Parallel (1) Compound structure: children’s understanding that a compound word is made up of modifier and head
(1)Riddle guess: same as Wang, Cheng, and
(1)Production: early in the morning the sun comes up, and this is called sunrise. At night, we see the moon come up. What could we call this? (answer:
(1)Sentence completion: My uncle is a. (clue word: farm)
Real
(2) Compound awareness (2)Production: Same as Cheung et al. (2010)
Table 3. (Continued)
Study Target populations Mode
Type of
morphology L1-L2 Operationalisation Sample item(s) Words
Yeh (2010) Chinese
Non-parallel (1) Inflectional awareness (1)Sentence completion: Bill is a boy and John is a boy. They are both _____. (boy)
Real
(2) Derivational awareness: (2)Sentence completion with affixation or high-frequency morphemes: (一 般人常常不懂得藥物的
(a) derivation (a) My uncle is a. (clue word: farm)
Real
(b) decomposition (b) The smoke in the room was very. (clue word:
(b)Production: Same as Cheung et al. (2010)
Pseudo
English: English:
(a) Morpheme identification
(a)Word relation judgement: Doesteachcome from
Table 3. (Continued)
Study Target populations Mode
Type of
morphology L1-L2 Operationalisation Sample item(s) Words
Zhang (2013) Chinese
(1)Word relation judgement: Doesteachcome from
(2)Sentence completion: My little sister brings us a lot of.(happily, unhappy,
(3)Riddle guess: same as Wang, Cheng, and Chen
Parallel Same as Zhang (2013) Same as Zhang (2013) Same as Zhang
Written Compound Non-parallel (1) Compound structure: the understanding of the modifier-head structure of nominal compounds
(1)Riddle guess: same as Wang, Cheng, & Chen
Table 3. (Continued)
Study Target populations Mode
Type of
morphology L1-L2 Operationalisation Sample item(s) Words
understanding that a word part shared by different words may vary in meaning in these words
(2)Multiple-choice:
classroom bedroom mushroom
(3) Radical awareness (in Chinese only)
(3)Multiple-choice: The character搬(to move) was presented with four components扌,舟,般, and殳. Only扌is the correct answer because it is the semantic radical that means hand or functions that have to be performed by hand.
Real
La
nguage
Awarenes
s
369
with a Chinese inflectional morpheme (e.g. the resultative potential infix得de, an adver-bial morpheme that has no corresponding word in English). Another language-specific measure was homophone identification, used by Wang et al. (2006), which tapped into young children’s ability to differentiate morphemes with the same sounds. The following subsections will discuss patterns of transfer of morphological awareness, to show what factors can affect, and how they can affect, the transfer between L1 and L2 morphological awareness.
Patterns of cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness
To recapitulate, transfer occurs as L1 reading skills are triggered involuntarily by L2 print input (Koda,2005). But it remains unclear the extent to which L1 morphological aware-ness can transfer and facilitate the development of L2 morphological awareaware-ness and L2 reading abilities between two languages that are typologically distant. We examined the correlation between L1 and L2 morphological awareness by coding pertinent effect sizes (i.e. zero-order correlation coefficient,r) in primary studies of Chinese English bilingual reading development. The magnitude of correlation was interpreted based on Cohen’s (1988) bench marks onr, with .1 being small, .25 being medium, and .4 being large.2As illustrated inTable 4, six studies found small-to-medium correlations between L1 and L2 morphological awareness. The two exceptions were the studies by Cheung et al. (2010) and Yeh (2010). Both observed large effect sizes (>.40). Cheung et al. (2010) assessed a single facet of morphological awareness (i.e. morphological construction) with L1 Chinese L2 English children at the lower elementary grades. Interestingly, while main-taining equivalent conceptual demands in L1 and L2 morphological awareness tasks, Cheung et al. (2010) included different types of words for L1 Chinese (pseudo-compound awareness) and L2 English (pseudo-derivation words). This differed from other studies that categorised morphological awareness based on a priori categorisation of morphology in Chinese and English (derivation versus compound). Yeh’s study, on the other hand, examined three major facets of morphological awareness (inflection, derivation, and com-pound) and found a high correlation (rD.45) between Chinese and English inflectional awareness with L1 Chinese L2 English middle-school students. Since Chinese is a mini-mally inflected language and L1 Chinese readers might rely less on inflectional mor-phemes when compared with their L1 English counterparts, logic would suggest that it would be very difficult to observe any transfer of inflectional awareness between Chinese and English. The reason for a large correlation (r>.40) in Yeh’s (2010) study will be dis-cussed further in the next section.
In addition to the overall magnitude of correlation between L1 and L2 morphological awareness, it is crucial to consider whether their relationship depends on the specific fac-ets under scrutiny. Given that previous studies categorised the subcomponents of morpho-logical awareness based on two types of morphology, derivation and compound, we compared the correlations between L1 and L2 derivational awareness with those between L1 and L2 compound awareness. Since compounding is often held as the shared word for-mation rules between Chinese and English but derivation is English-specific (e.g. Zhang, 2013), we predicted that the correlations between L1 and L2 compound awareness should have been larger than those between L1 and L2 derivational awareness. However, the results were complicated. As shown inTable 4, the correlations remained moderate for both derivational and compound awareness in four out of five studies that measured both facets. In the study reported by Wang et al. (2006), the correlation of L1 L2 derivational awareness (rD.28) was even larger than that of L1 L2 compound awareness (rD.14). 370 S. Ke and F. Xiao
Table 4. Summary of correlation between Chinese and English morphological awareness.
Study
Sample size
Facets of morphological
awareness
Effect size (s) (Pearson’sr)
Statistical
modelling Findings
Wang, Cheng, and Chen (2006) 64 Compound morphology .14 Regression (1) Transfer of morphological awareness was only found from L2 English to L1 Chinese, but not vice versa.
(2) L2 English compound morphological awareness explained unique variance in both Chinese reading and Chinese reading comprehension. But there was no transfer effect of English derivational awareness to Chinese reading.
Derivation morphology .28 Homophone morphology .13
Wang, Yang, and Cheng (2009) 78 Compound structure .13 Regression (1) Cross-language morphological transfer occurred for compound structure awareness.(2) English compound structure awareness contributed to Chinese character reading over and above the Chinese tasks.
Cheung et al. (2010) 141 Morphological construction .55 Regression (1) For the low-vocabulary subgroup, there were no transfer effects; but for the high-vocabulary subgroup, Chinese categorical perception, morphological awareness, and phonological awareness (marginally) do predict English vocabulary uniquely.
Pasquarella et al. (2011) 137 Compound awareness .32 SEM (1) English compound awareness, but not English derivational awareness, transferred to Chinese and enhanced the development of Chinese vocabulary and reading comprehension.
(2) There was a reciprocal relationship between English compound awareness and Chinese vocabulary. Derivational awareness .22
Yeh (2010) 287 Inflectional awareness .45 SEM (1) Positive correlations were found among the development of students’ Verbal Aptitude, Chinese morphological awareness, and English morphological Derivational awareness .34
Compound awareness .37
(continued)
La
nguage
Awarenes
s
371
Table 4. (Continued)
Study
Sample size
Facets of morphological
awareness
Effect size (s) (Pearson’sr)
Statistical
modelling Findings
awareness.
(2) Further examinations of each individual Chinese sub-awareness and their relationship to the English morphological awareness illustrate that only the model of the Chinese Awareness of Compound Words to the English morphological awareness showed a good fit to the data.
Zhang (2013) 204 Morphological relation .28 SEM (1) The contribution of Chinese morphological awareness to English morphological awareness was larger for compound words than for derived words. Affix choice .19 (2) The indirect effect of Chinese compound awareness
on English compound word meaning inference was significant, but that of Chinese derivational awareness on English derived word meaning inference did not achieve significance.
Compound structure .15 Morpheme discrimination .21
Zhang and Koda (2014) 245 Morphological relation .26 Regression (1) Cross-linguistically, Chinese compound awareness explained a unique proportion of variance in English reading comprehension, over and above English vocabulary knowledge, English compound
awareness, and other related variables. Such a cross-linguistic effect, however, was not found of English compound awareness on Chinese reading
comprehension.(2) Derivational awareness in one language did not show a significant cross-linguistic relationship with reading comprehension in the other language, when other variables were considered. Affix choice .19
Compound structure .20 Morpheme discrimination .22
Zhang, Koda, and Sun (2014) 96 Compound structure .15 Regression
(continued)
372
S.
Ke
and
F.
Xiao
Table 4. (Continued)
Study
Sample size
Facets of morphological
awareness
Effect size (s) (Pearson’sr)
Statistical
modelling Findings
(1) Compound awareness contributed to reading comprehension within both Chinese and English. (2) Over and above English compound awareness and
Chinese reading comprehension, Chinese compound awareness, but not radical awareness, explained a unique amount of variance in English reading comprehension. After Chinese compound awareness was controlled for, English compound awareness, however, did not make a significant contribution to Chinese reading comprehension.
Morpheme discrimination .35 Radical awareness .20
Note: With regard to studies that have multiple measures of morphological awareness, effect sizes are coded for parallel measures between L1 and L2. When we coded non-parallel measures between L1 and L2 (marked with ‘’), an averaged effect size were calculated for correlations across measures. SEM stands for structural equation modelling.
La
nguage
Awarenes
s
373
These results seem to contradict the claim that the reciprocal relationship of morphologi-cal awareness between Chinese and English is stronger for compound words than for derived words.
Another related question is whether transfer only occurred in a unidirectional fashion, that is, from L1 to L2. There was inconsistency across the primary studies: five out of eight observed unidirectional transfer effects from L1 Chinese morphological awareness to L2 English morphological awareness; two found unidirectional transfer from L2 English morphological awareness to L1 Chinese morphological awareness (Wang et al., 2006; Wang, Yang, & Cheng,2009); and one observed bidirectional transfer between L1 Chinese and L2 English morphological awareness (Pasquarella et al.,2011). An extensive discussion on transfer effects is presented in the next section.
Factors affecting the transfer effects
The preceding discussion has shown that there is a small-to-medium correlation of mor-phological awareness between L1 and L2 in Chinese English bilingual readers, suggest-ing that morphological awareness is sharable between writsuggest-ing systems regardless of their typological differences. Yet, with regard to the direction of transfer, there was a notable variance in the primary studies. According to Koda et al. (2014), the extent to which L1 skills could transfer to and alter subsequent reading development was affected by three factors: (1) linguistic distance, (2) L2 mapping experience, and (3) task demands. The lat-ter two are evidenced in the current synthesis.
First, L2 linguistic and literacy exposure might affect the direction of transfer. For example, Wang et al. (2006) and Wang, Yang, & Cheng,2009) observed a unidirectional transfer of morphological awareness from L2 English to L1 Chinese with English-domi-nant bilingual children in the USA. They argued that this was due to the bilingual child-ren’s rapidly increasing L2 English skills in their elementary school years. According to these authors, the participants’ Chinese language and literacy practices were limited to their home environments. In contrast, with another cohort of English-dominant bilingual children at elementary schools in Canada, Pasquarella et al. (2011) found bidirectional transfer of morphological awareness. One difference associated with the participants’ lan-guage and literacy profiles might be that the children in this study attended Chinese heri-tage language programmes weekly. Therefore, although the children were from English-medium schools, their maintenance of Chinese skills might be beneficial to the concurrent development of morphological awareness in both languages.
Another major factor that merits further examination is task demands, which is tied to the question of how morphological awareness is defined and measured. The primary stud-ies almost uniformly referred to Carlisle’s (1995) conceptualisation, which deems mor-phological awareness to be the ability to reflect upon and manipulate morpheme constituents in visual word processing for the purpose of meaning construction. In essence, morphological awareness is a major subcomponent of metalinguistic awareness that facilitates the grapheme morpheme mapping in reading. Therefore, morphological awareness tasks, like other tasks assessing reading skills, necessitate both conceptual manipulation and linguistic knowledge (including morphological knowledge). However, there is a gap between the definition and operationalisation because the primary studies focused predominantly on the linguistic demands by comparing language-specific and language-general word formation rules in Chinese and English. It was assumed that com-pounding is shared between Chinese and English, whereas derivation is English-specific. If this is the case, the correlations of compound awareness were supposed to be higher 374 S. Ke and F. Xiao
than those of derivational awareness in the primary studies. However, the findings of pre-vious studies showed that the magnitude of the correlation was small to moderate. This might be the reason why Yeh (2010) observed a large correlation of inflection awareness between Chinese and English despite the fact that inflection is rare in Chinese. Suffice it to say, cross-linguistic transfer is not induced by the priori morphology shared between the two languages only (e.g. compounding between Chinese and English), but conceptual and linguistic demands shared in the morphological awareness tasks segmenting ortho-graphical forms into meaningful chunks (see Ehri,2005).
Other factors that might affect the cross-linguistic transfer effect of morphological awareness include the inclusion of control measures (e.g. verbal short-term memory), types of words used in the morphological awareness task (e.g. real words vs. pseudo words), and types of statistical models. For instance, four studies that were included in this analysis used oral measures of morphological awareness (i.e. Cheung et al., 2010; Pasquarella et al.,2011; Wang et al.,2006; Wang, Yang, & Cheng,2009), among which, Cheung et al.’s (2010) study is the only one that included verbal short-term memory (measured by Wechsler’s forward digit span test) as a control variable and found a large correlation between L1 and L2 morphological awareness (r>.4); others only observed small to medium correlations. In addition, the choice between real words and pseudo-words also matters since access to real word meanings might tap into tacit linguistic knowledge as opposed to morphological awareness. Finally, it should be noted that corre-lational evidence presented in this synthesis and the primary studies does not warrant any inference of causal relationship. But multilevel modelling, such as structural equation modelling, could reduce measurement errors and allow for inference of causality. Among the eight studies, three have taken advantage of this statistical method (i.e. Pasquarella et al.,2011; Yeh,2010; Zhang,2013).
Conclusions and implications
This review has examined the cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness between Chinese and English, which has received relatively limited attention in previous studies of bilingual reading development. Specifically, it examined the definition and measurement of morphological awareness in prior work, the patterns of transfer, and potential factors that could affect the transfer effects. The findings of the review have shown that there is consensus on the conceptualisation of morphological awareness as the ability to recognise and analyse morphemes in print word processing, but inconsistency in assessing it as a multifaceted construct. Furthermore, when examining the cross-lin-guistic transfer of morphological awareness, researchers should pay equal attention to both the writing system and the language system. Yet, previous research has focused mainly on the differences in the language systems and compared a priori word formation rules (derivation and compound), and limited attention was paid to the conceptual manip-ulation inherent in the orthographies of the two languages. In other words, the existing lit-erature has examined the language-specific facets of morphological awareness, which has affected the magnitude of correlations between L1 and L2 morphological awareness observed in the primary studies. Also, it was found that the direction of transfer was not limited to being from L1 to L2. Unidirectional transfer from L2 to L1 or bidirectional transfer occurred when the L2 was dominant in Chinese English bilingual learners who were still developing skills in two languages concurrently. Finally, this review has shown that cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness can occur between two typologi-cally distinct languages, but the extent to which morphological awareness developed from Language Awareness 375
one language transfers and facilitates the acquisition of morphological awareness in another language is susceptible to L2 language and literacy experience and the demands of the morphological awareness tasks.
To sum up, several gaps have been identified in this review. First, future research should align the measurement with the definition of morphological awareness. Given that it is a multifaceted construct, multiple measures should be utilised, tapping into both lan-guage-general and language-specific facets of morphological awareness. Second, previ-ous studies mainly examined cross-linguistic transfer effects of morphological awareness in bilingual children at elementary school level. Our understanding needs to be expanded to a larger population of different cognitive and linguistic profiles, for example, adoles-cent and adult bilingual readers learning a second language other than English. Third, to provide more in-depth explanations of the way in which morphological awareness func-tions as an important resource in bilingual (and monolingual) reading development, future research should include a wider range of cognitive variables as control measures, which could potentially confound or mediate the effects of morphological awareness (see also Zhang, Lin, Wei, & Anderson,2014). Fourth, our findings were based on cross-sectional studies with correlational data, which do not include longitudinal and interventional stud-ies to maintain compatibility across primary studstud-ies. It should be noted that, to date, there have been several longitudinal and interventional studies to gain causal evidence of cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness (e.g. Wang, Lin, & Yang, 2014; Zhang et al.,2010). However, there is still a great need to conduct longitudinal and inter-ventional studies to examine how morphological awareness serves as a sharable resource in reading across languages over time. Lastly, this review focused on the role of morpho-logical awareness in bilingual reading development in Chinese and English. In order to develop a better understanding of how morphological awareness functions as a cross-lin-guistically sharable resource in L2 reading development, it is important for future researchers to examine other language pairs that are typologically distant (e.g. English and Arabic in Saiegh-Haddad & Geva, 2008; Hebrew and English in Schiff & Calif, 2007; Japanese and English in Hayashi & Murphy,2013).
Acknowledgements
We sincerely appreciate comments from the reviewers and editors. All remaining errors are our own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. An oft-cited language-specific facet of morphological awareness in Chinese is semantic radical awareness (e.g. Zhang, Koda, & Sun,2014). This is not included in the discussion of this syn-thesis for the following reasons: (1) semantic radical awareness does not qualify for being one dimension of morphological awareness according to the widely-cited definition in extant litera-ture: morphological awareness refers to the ability to analyse a word’s morpheme constituents in visual word processing for the purpose of meaning construction (Carlisle,1995,2000; see also Kuo & Anderson,2006,2008). Morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in a (spoken) language. Semantic radical in Chinese is not a morpheme but a sublexical orthographic unit that carries semantic cues. (2) We agree that word processing in Chinese involve multilevel interaction at the sublexical and lexical levels. Yet, it seems that previous studies have 376 S. Ke and F. Xiao
overstated the contribution of semantic radicals to Chinese word meaning retrieval. Many of them focused on single characters, less representative of contemporary Chinese written words (Lexicon of Common Words in Contemporary Chinese Research Team,2008), the majority of which are two- and three-character words (84%). Moreover, it should be noted that the semantic cues provided by semantic radicals are not always consistent and reliable (Chung & Leung,
2008). (3) Based on (1) and (2), we propose that research on orthographic awareness, ortho-morphological awareness, and semantic radical awareness in Chinese is worth examining. But it does not fit in the scope of this synthesis.
2. Even though readers may be more familiar with Cohen’sdas an effect size measure based on studies with mean differences across independent groups or with matched groups, or with pre post designs, this review focused on correlation (r) between two continuous variables, which is based on studies that examined the transfer of morphological awareness between L1 and L2 within one group (Borenstein, Hedges, Higgins, & Rothstein,2009). We also noted that although specific effect sizes based on correlations have been proposed for Second Language Acquisition research (0.4 being a small effect; 0.7 medium; and 1.0 considered as a large effect), they should not be taken as the ‘golden’ rules (Oswald & Plonsky,2010). Following this set of rules, the unique contributions of morphological awareness would be taken as small, which might lead to the underestimation of the relevance of morphological awareness for instructional practices (see also Nagy et al.,2014). In this review, we adopted Cohen’s bench-marks, which have been widely used in meta-analyses to interpret the magnitude of correlation in social science (as cited in Li, Shintani, & Ellis,2012, p. 12).
Notes on contributors
Sihui Keis a PhD candidate in second language acquisition at the Department of Modern Lan-guages, Carnegie Mellon University, USA. She is interested in second language reading and biliter-acy acquisition, psycholinguistics, foreign language assessment and instruction, and language planning and policy.
Feng Xiaois an assistant professor of Asian Languages and Literatures at Pomona College, USA. His research interests are interlanguage and intercultural pragmatics, technology-enhanced learning, and statistical language learning.
ORCID
Sihui Ke http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2665-0637 Feng Xiao http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7885-5987
References
In synthesis-type of research articles, references of selected studies have been marked by “*”.
Alderson, J. C., Brunfaut, T., & Harding, T. (2015). Towards a theory of diagnosis in second and foreign language assessment: Insights from professional practice across diverse fields.Applied Linguistics, 36(2), 236 260.
Apel, K. (2014). A comprehensive definition of morphological awareness: Implications for assess-ment.Topics in Language Disorders, 34(3), 197 209.
August, D., & Shanahan, T. (Eds.). (2006). Developing literacy in second-language learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Borenstein, M., Hedges, L. V., Higgins, J. P. T., & Rothstein, H. R. (2009).Introduction to meta-analysis. Chichester: Wiley.
Carlisle, J. F. (1995). Morphological awareness and early reading achievement. In L. B. Feldman (Ed.),Morphological aspects of language processing(pp. 189 209). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Carlisle, J. F. (2000). Awareness of the structure and meaning of morphologically complex words:
Impact on reading.Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 12(3), 169 190. Language Awareness 377
Carlisle, J. F., McBride-Chang, C., Nagy, W., & Nunes, T. (2010). Effects of instruction in morpho-logical awareness on literacy achievement: An integrative review.Reading Research Quarterly, 45(4), 464 487.
Carr, T. H., & Levy, B. A. (Eds.). (1990). Reading and its development: Component skills approaches. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Cheung, H., Chung, K. K. H., Wong, S. W. L., McBride-Chang, C., Penney, T. B., Ho, C. S. -H.
(2010). Speech perception, metalinguistic awareness, reading, and vocabulary in Chinese-English bilingual children.Journal of Educational Psychology, 102(2), 367 380.
Chung, F. H. -K., & Leung, M. -T. (2008). Data analysis of Chinese characters in primary school corpora of Hong Kong and mainland China: Preliminary theoretical interpretations.Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 22(4 5), 379 389.
Cohen, J. (1988).Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Deacon, S. H., Wade-Woolley, L., & Kirby, J. (2007). Crossover: The role of morphological aware-ness in French immersion children’s reading.Developmental Psychology, 43(3), 732 746. Ehri, L. C. (2005). Learning to read words: Theory, findings, and issues.Scientific Studies of
Read-ing, 9(2), 167 188.
Frost, R. (2012). Towards a universal model of reading. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 35(5), 263 279.
Genesee, F., Geva, E., Dressler, C., & Kamil, M. (2006). Synthesis: Cross-linguistic relationships. In D. August & T. Shanahan (Eds.), Developing Literacy in Second-Language Learners (pp. 153 174). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum and Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Hao, M., Chen, X., Dronjic, V., Shu, H., & Anderson, R. C. (2013). The development of young
Chi-nese children’s morphological awareness: The role of semantic relatedness and morpheme type. Applied Psycholinguistics, 34, 45 67.
Hayashi, Y., & Murphy, V. A. (2013). On the nature of morphological awareness in Japanese Eng-lish bilingual children: A cross-linguistic perspective.Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 16(01), 49 67.
Kieffer, M. J. (2014). Morphological awareness and reading difficulties in adolescent Spanish-speaking language minority learners and their classmates. Journal of Learning Disability, 47(1), 44 53.
Kieffer, M. J., & Lesaux, N. K. (2008). The role of derivational morphology in the reading compre-hension of Spanish-speaking English language learners.Reading and Writing: An Interdisci-plinary Journal, 21(8), 783 804.
Kieffer, M. J., & Lesaux, N. K. (2012). Direct and indirect roles of morphological awareness in the English reading comprehension of native English, Spanish, Filipino, and Vietnamese speakers. Language Learning, 62(4), 1170 1204.
Koda, K. (2000). Cross-linguistic variations in L2 morphological awareness.Applied Psycholin-guistics, 21, 297 320.
Koda, K. (2005).Insights into second language reading: A cross-linguistic approach. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Koda, K. (2007). Reading and language learning: Cross-linguistic constraints on second language reading development.Language learning, 57(suppl.1), 1 44.
Koda, K. (2008). Impacts of prior literacy experience on second-language learning to read. In K. Koda & A. M. Zehler (Eds.),Learning to read across languages: Cross-linguistic rela-tionships in first- and second- language literacy development (pp. 68 96). New York, NY: Routledge.
Koda, K., L€u, C., & Zhang, D. (2014). L1-induced facilitation in biliteracy development in Chinese and English. In X. Chen, Q. Wang, & Y. C. Luo (Eds.),Reading development and difficulties in monolingual and bilingual Chinese children(pp. 141 169). New York, NY: Springer. Koda, K., & Reddy, R. (2008). Cross-linguistic transfer in second language reading.Language
Teaching, 41, 497 508.
Ku, Y. -M. & Anderson, R. C. (2003). Development of morphological awareness in Chinese and English.Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 16,399 422.
Kuo, L. -J., & Anderson, R. C. (2006). Morphological awareness and learning to read: A cross-lan-guage perspective.Educational Psychologist, 41(3), 161 180.
Kuo, L. -J., & Anderson, R. C. (2008). Conceptual and methodological issues in comparing metalin-guistic awareness across languages. In K. Koda & A. M. Zehler (Eds.),Learning to read across 378 S. Ke and F. Xiao
languages: Cross-linguistic relationships in first- and second- language literacy development (pp. 68 96). New York, NY: Routledge.
Lee, S. (2011).The relationship between morphological awareness and literacy outcomes of ele-mentary students: A meta-analysis study (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Eugene, OR: University of Oregon.
Lexicon of Common Words in Contemporary Chinese Research Team. (2008).Lexicon of common words in contemporary Chinese(in Chinese). Beijing: The Commercial Press.
Li, C. N., & Thompson, S. A. (1981).Mandarin Chinese: A functional reference grammar. Berke-ley: University of California Press.
Li, S., Shintani, R., & Ellis, R. (2012). Doing meta-analysis in SLA: Practices, choices, and stand-ards.Contemporary Foreign Language Studies, 384(12), 1 17.
Li, T. & McBride-Chang, C. (2014). How character reading can be different from word reading in Chinese and why matters for Chinese reading development. In X. Chen, Q. Wang, & Y. C. Luo (Eds.),Reading development and difficulties in monolingual and bilingual Chinese children (Literacy studies 8). Dordrecht: Springer ScienceCBusiness Media. doi:10.1007/978-94-007-7380-6_3
Lin, T. -J., Anderson, R. J., Ku, Y. -M., Christianson, K., & Packard, J. L. (2011). Chinese child-ren’s concept of word.Writing Systems Research, 3(1), 41 57.
Lu, J. -Y., Wu, W. -D., & Chien, M. -C. (2001).The junior high school students’ scholastic aptitude test. Taipei: Psychological Publishing.
Mattingly, I. G. (1984). Reading, linguistic awareness, and language acquisition. In J. Downing & R. Valtin (Eds.), Language awareness and learning (pp. 9 26). New York, NY: Springer-Verlag.
McBride, C. A. (2015). Is Chinese special? Four aspects of Chinese literacy acquisition that might distinguish learning Chinese from learning alphabetic orthographies.Educational Psychology Review,1 27. Advance online publication. doi:10.1007/s10648-015-9318-2
McBride-Chang, C., Tardif, T., Cho, J. -R., Shu, H., Flether, P., Strokes, S. F.,…Kawai, L.. (2008).
What’s in a word? Morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge in three languages. Applied Psycholinguistics, 29, 437 462.
McBride-Chang, C., Wagner, R. K., Muse, A., Chow, B. W. -Y., & Shu, H. (2005). The role of mor-phological awareness in children’s vocabulary acquisition in English.Applied Psycholinguis-tics, 26, 415 435.
Mori, Y., & Nagy, W. (1999). Integration of information from context and word elements in inter-preting novel kanji compounds.Reading Research Quarterly, 34, 80 101.
Nagy, W. E. & Anderson, R. C. (1995).Metalinguistic awareness and literacy development in dif-ferent languages. Champaign, IL: Center for the Study of Reading. Retrieved from https:// www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/17594/ctrstreadtechrepv01995i00618_opt.pdf?s Nagy, W. E., Berninger, V., & Abbott, R. (2006). Contributions of morphology beyond phonology to literacy outcomes of upper elementary and middle school students.Journal of Educational Psychology, 98, 134 147.
Nagy, W. E., Carlisle, J. F., & Goodwin, A. P. (2014). Morphological knowledge and literacy acqui-sition.Journal of Learning Disability, 47(3), 3 12.
Oswald, F. L., & Plonsky, L. (2010). Meta-analysis in second language research: Choices and chal-lenges.Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 30, 85 110.
Packard, J.L. (2000).The morphology of Chinese. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Pasquarella, A., Chen, X., Lam, K., & Luo, Y. C. (2011). Cross-language transfer of morphological
awareness in Chinese English bilinguals.Journal of Research in Reading, 34(1), 23 42. Perfetti, C. A. (2003). The universal grammar of reading.Scientific Studies of Reading, 7(1), 3 24. Perfetti, C. A. (2007). Reading ability: Lexical quality to comprehension.Scientific Studies of
Read-ing, 11, 357 383.
Perfetti, C.A., Cao, F., & Booth, J. (2013). Specialization and universals in the development of read-ing skill: How Chinese research informs a universal science of readread-ing. Scientific Studies of Reading, 17(1), 5 21.
Perfetti, C. A., & Hart, L. (2002). The lexical quality hypothesis. In L. Verhoeven, C. Elbro, & P. Reitsma (Eds.),Precursors of functional literacy(pp. 189 213). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ramirez, G., Chen, X. & Pasquarella, A. (2013). Cross-linguistic transfer of morphological
aware-ness in Spanish-speaking English language learners: The facilitating effects of cognate knowl-edge.Topics in Language disorders, 33(1), 73 92.
Language Awareness 379
Raven, J., Raven, J. C., & Court, J. H. (1998).Manual for Raven’s progressive matrices and vocab-ulary scales. Section 3: the standard progressive matrices. Oxford: Oxford Psychologists Press/ San Antonio, TX: The Psychological Corporation.
Saiegh-Haddad, E., & Geva, E. (2008). Morphological awareness, phonological awareness, and reading in English Arabic bilingual children. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 21, 481 504.
Schiff, R., & Calif, S. (2007). Role of phonological and morphological awareness in L2 oral word reading.Language Learning, 57(2), 271 298.
Tyler, A., & Nagy, W. (1989). The acquisition of English derivational morphology. Journal of Memory and Language, 28, 649 667.
Verhoeven, L., & Carlisle, J. F. (2006). Introduction to the special issue: Morphology in word iden-tification and word spelling.Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 19, 643 650. Verhoeven, L., & Perfetti, C. A. (2011). Morphological processing in reading acquisition: A
cross-linguistic perspective.Applied Psycholinguistics, 32, 457 466.
Wang, M., Cheng, C., & Chen, S. -W. (2006). Contribution of morphological awareness to
Chinese English biliteracy acquisition.Journal of Educational Psychology, 98(3), 542 553. Wang, M., Ko, I. Y., & Choi, J. (2009). The importance of morphological awareness in
Kore-an English biliteracy acquisition.Contemporary Educational Psychology, 34, 132 142. Wang, M., Lin, C. Y., & Yang, C. (2014). Contributions of phonology, orthography, and
morphol-ogy in Chinese English biliteracy acquisition: A one year longitudinal study. In X. Chen, Q. Wang, & Y. C. Luo (Eds.),Reading development and difficulties in monolingual and bilingual Chinese children(pp. 191 211). New York, NY: Springer.
Wang, M., Yang, C., & Cheng, C. (2009). The contributions of phonology, orthography, and
mor-phology in Chinese English biliteracy acquisition.Applied Psycholinguistics, 20,291 314. Wechsler, D. (1974).Manual for the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for children revised. New York,
NY: Psychological Corporation.
Yeh, Y. -F. (2010).The cross-linguistic morphological awareness transfer: The development of
Chinese-speaking adolescent learners’ English morphological awareness. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University.
Zhang, D. (2013). Linguistic distance effect on cross-linguistic transfer of morphological aware-ness.Applied Psycholinguistics, 34(5), 917 942.
Zhang, D., & Koda, K. (2013). Morphological awareness and reading comprehension in a foreign
language: A study of young Chinese EFL learners.System, 41, 901 913.
Zhang, D., & Koda, K. (2014). Awareness of derivation and compounding in Chinese-English
bili-teracy acquisition.International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism,17, 55 73.
Zhang, D., Koda, K., & Sun, X. (2014). Morphological awareness in biliteracy acquisition: A study
of young Chinese EFL readers.International Journal of Bilingualism, 18(6), 570 585. Zhang, J., Anderson, R. C., Li, H., Dong, Q., Wu, X., & Zhang, Y. (2010). Cross-language transfer
of insight into the structure of compound words.Reading and Writing, 23(3 4), 311 336. Zhang, J., Lin, T., Wei, J., & Anderson, R. (2014). Morphological awareness and learning to read
Chinese and English. In X. Chen, Q. Wang, & Y. C. Luo (Eds.),Reading development and diffi-culties of monolingual and bilingual Chinese children(Vol. 8, pp. 3 22). Dordrecht: Springer Science.
380 S. Ke and F. Xiao
