Chloé Xin-Tong Lu, Anna Jia-Jun Zhang, Urs Maurer, Catherine McBride, Tomohiro Inoue
We examined the within- and cross-language cognitive correlates ofmorphological awareness in L1 Chinese and L2 English in HongKong Chinese children. Three hundred twenty-seven Chinese-English bilingual children (Mage = 87.29 months; 50.4% female) inGrades 1–4 were assessed on nonverbal IQ, phonologicalawareness, vocabulary knowledge, orthographic awareness, andmorphological awareness in both languages. Results of pathanalyses showed that Chinese phonological awareness, vocabularyknowledge, and orthographic awareness were all independentlyassociated with Chinese morphological awareness after controllingfor the effects of age and nonverbal IQ. English vocabularyknowledge and orthographic awareness were associated withEnglish morphological awareness. In addition, Chinese vocabularyknowledge and morphological awareness were associated withEnglish morphological awareness over and above the effects ofEnglish vocabulary knowledge and orthographic awareness. Thesefindings suggest that morphological awareness in L1 Chinese andL2 English may share semantic processes, providing evidence forthe cross-linguistic associations of bilingual morphological awareness.