5. Limitations and Future Directions

Our study had several limitations. First, since this is a cross-sectional study, it does not provide evidence about whether a causal relationship exists between compound awareness and literacy development. As discussed earlier, we believe the relationship is reciprocal, although this hypothesis needs to be tested by future research. Second, due to the relatively small number of participants in each grade, children from grade one and grade two were combined in data analysis. As a result, our study offered only limited micro-level developmental information. It is clear, however, that children performed more accurately in grade two than in grade one on all the measures. Future research should examine in more detail the developmental trajectories of compound awareness in relation to literacy outcome measures in Chinese. Since our results showed that basic level compound awareness develops relatively early among Chinese children, more complex tasks need to be designed for older children.

Our study points to several important directions for further research. Morphological awareness is multi-faced construct that includes phonological, semantic, syntactic, and in the case of written language, orthographic aspects(Carlisle, 2000; Kuo & Anderson, 2006). Because only a small number of studies have investigated morphological awareness in Chinese, at this point, it is unclear how different aspects of morphological awareness are interrelated. In our study, the two compound awareness tasks were not correlated, indicating that they might tap different aspects of compound awareness. Future studies should systematically examine different aspects of compound awareness and their interrelationships. Furthermore, all the compounds tested in the present study were nouns with a subordinate structure, in which the head morpheme specifies the semantic category of the compound and the other morpheme(s) modify or restrict the head morpheme, e.g. 花瓶huaping (flower bottle: vase). There are, however, other types of structure such as coordinative, e.g. 国家guojia (nation family: country), subject-predicate, e.g. 地震dizhen (earth shake: earthquake), verb-object, e.g. 唱歌changge (sing song: sing), and verb-complement, e.g. 提高tigao (raise high: enhance). Chinese compounds also fulfill different morph-syntactic functions, such as verbs and adjectives. In order to become a fluent reader, Chinese children need to master different types of compounds. Investigating how children develop awareness of different types of compound words may be an exciting new direction for future research in Chinese children’s reading development.

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