From Perceived Control to Comprehension: Task Nervousness as a Mediator and Linguistic Skills as Moderators in Grade 4 Chinese Readers

Reading comprehension reflects the coordinated interplay of linguistic processing and readers’ motivational and emotional experiences. Yet most evidence on control-related appraisals and anxiety comes from alphabetic languages, leaving their roles in Chinese less clear. Guided by Control-Value Theory and the Direct and Indirect Effects Model of Reading, this study tested a moderated mediation model in 355 Grade 4 L1 Chinese readers. Students completed a low-stakes reading comprehension task, rated perceived control and task nervousness, and completed assessments of phonological awareness, morphological awareness, word reading fluency, and sentence reading fluency. Bootstrapped analyses indicated a significant indirect association between perceived control and reading comprehension via task nervousness. This indirect association was weaker among students with stronger morphological awareness and higher word- and sentence-level fluency, but did not vary with phonological awareness. These findings highlight morphological awareness and reading fluency as linguistic resources that may buffer anxiety-related comprehension difficulties in Chinese reading. Pedagogically, reading instruction may benefit from strengthening learners’ perceived control while developing morphological awareness and reading fluency.