Effects of morphological awareness and orthographic consistency on word recognition and reading comprehension in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

This study aims to investigate effects of orthographic consistency and of morphological awareness in Chinese word recognition and comprehension among skilled native adult readers. Learning and recognizing Chinese words usually require a successful convergence of script-to-sound-and-meaning of one or more Chinese characters. While previous studies investigate the interaction and the influence of orthography and morphological awareness between different but similar languages (e.g., Paulesu et al., 2000 comparing English and Italian; Rau et al., 2015 comparing English and German), we find that Chinese provides a perfect context to further investigate this issue, with variation of simplified and traditional Chinese characters.