Morphological Awareness, Orthographic Knowledge, and Spelling Errors: Keys to Understanding Early Chinese Literacy Acquisition

This 1-year longitudinal study examined the extent to which morphological aware-ness, orthographic knowledge, and phonological awareness, along with speeded naming, uniquely explained word recognition, dictation (i.e., spelling), and reading comprehension among 171 young Hong Kong Chinese children. With age and vo-cabulary knowledge statistically controlled, both morphological awareness and or-thographic knowledge were uniquely associated with all three concurrently mea-sured literacy skills, as well as longitudinal measures of specific literacy skills. Naming speed was also uniquely associated with concurrent word reading, as well as all three literacy skills longitudinally, even with their autoregressive effects con-trolled. Analyses of children’s spelling mistakes indicated that 97 % and 95 % of all errors were either morpholexically or orthographically based at times 1 and 2, re-spectively. Morphologically based spelling errors were also uniquely associated with all three literacy skills across time. Findings underscore the importance of morpho-logical awareness and orthographic knowledge for Chinese literacy acquisition