ERIC Number: EJ1463013
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2024
Pages: 22
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: EISSN-1539-0578
Available Date: 0000-00-00
The Recognition of Chinese Compound Words by Native English- and Korean-Speaking Learners of Chinese
Reading in a Foreign Language, v36 n1 2024
Challenges in reading Chinese as a foreign language involve the large proportion of two-character compound words which have complex intra-word morphological structures and scriptal distance between learner's native language (L1) and Chinese as a second or foreign language. This study extended a previous investigation on the processing of Chinese coordinative compound words to various morphological structures to examine L1 effects and intra-word structure effects during compound word recognition and identify difficulty order associated with the different structures of Chinese compound words. Native English- and Korean-speaking learners of Chinese (n = 25, n = 13, respectively), along with native Chinese readers (n = 29) participated. Both learners' L1s and the morphological structures of compound words exerted significant main effects on compound word recognition. For non-native readers, the Korean group processed the five structures of compounds faster but less accurately than did the English-speaking counterpart. For both non-native groups, the subject-predicate structure was the most difficult to recognize, followed by the verb-complement structure.
Descriptors: Word Recognition, Chinese, Korean, Native Language, Second Language Learning, Morphology (Languages), English, Difficulty Level, Reading Processes, Accuracy, Sentence Structure, Language Classification, Contrastive Linguistics, Language Proficiency, Language Tests, Task Analysis
National Foreign Language Resource Center at University of Hawaii. 1859 East-West Road #106, Honolulu, HI 96822. e-mail: readfl@hawaii.edu; Web site: https://nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl/
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A