Does Morphology Play an Important Role in L2 Chinese Vocabulary Acquisition?

The present study examined the role of morphological awareness in second language (L2) Chinese vocabulary acquisition through an investigation of linguistic universality and specificity underlying morphological awareness. Morphological awareness in this study was conceptualized as a universal and sharable cognitive resource as well as a language-dependent metalinguistic skill. College-level Chinese as a second language learners (N = 171) participated in this study. Assessments of universal morphological awareness (morpheme recognition and morpheme discrimination), language-specific morphological awareness (compound structure analysis and compound structure discrimination), and vocabulary knowledge (word-meaning knowledge and character knowledge) were administered to the participants. A structural equation modeling analysis indicated that language-universal morphological awareness and language-specific morphological awareness jointly predicted L2 Chinese vocabulary knowledge. More important, a follow-up regression analysis verified the relative contribution of multifaceted morphological awareness to vocabulary knowledge. The findings revealed that language-specific morphological awareness in the form of compound structure awareness predicted a significant but small proportion of variance after universal morphological awareness was controlled for. The importance of morphological awareness and pedagogical implications is discussed.