The Development of Morphemic Processing in Reading Chinese Compound Words

Abstract The current study investigated the development of morphemic processing in reading Chinese compound words. A total of 14 grade 2 children and 17 grade 6 children were recruited. A word-naming task and a character- naming task were conducted. Significant boundedness effects were observed in both word and character-naming tasks in grade 2. In contrast, significant boundedness effect was only found in character naming but not in word naming in grade 6. Results revealed that the functional size of morphemes that beginning readers can manipulate progresses from large to small grain size. This developmental pattern provides supplementary information to the psycholinguistic grain size theory (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005) to better explain reading development of Chinese. Educational and clinical implications were also discussed.