Abstract: Morphological structural awareness is a kind of meta-linguistic awareness which reflects explicit representation of language structure. It can be manifested as the ability of understanding the relationship of morphemes in a poly-morphemic word, and constructing new words with the given morphemes on the basis of morphological rules. The functional category of internal components may influence understanding and manipulation of compound words. The current research controlled this factor in order to detect children’s understanding of different compound structures. However, only three structures (i.e. modified, verb-object, subject-predicate) can be composed by a verb and a noun. Therefore the current study only referred to these three structures. The participants were consisted of four subgroups, 5-, 6-, 7-, and 8-years old. 30 children were recruited in each group. They were required to perform a morphology decision task. The participants were provided orally with a description of a new entity or event, then were required to select a proper name between two alternative choices for it. We performed repeated measures ANOVAs. Main effects of age and types of morphological structure are significant, and these two factors have interactive effects. Simple effect analysis results showed that: (1) The difference between these three morphological awareness of 5-year-old children wasn’t significant. For 6- and 7-year-old children, modified and verb-object awareness were both better than subject-predicate awareness. For 8-year-old children, modified awareness were better than verb-object awareness, and verb-object awareness was better than subject-predicate awareness. (2) Only modified awareness increased with the development of age. According to the account of independency, linguistic separateness of an expression corresponded to the conceptual independence of the object or event which it represents. Some structures were suitable for denoting objects and could be easily applied to form words, while others were suitable for denoting events and could be easily applied to form sentences. For example, modified compounding structure was suitable for denoting objects, but verb-object and subject-predicate compounding structure belonged to the latter one. So when the participants were required to form a new word, they preferred modified compounding structure. What’s more, compared to the verb-object structure, the subject-predicate structure could denote a complete event, so it was more difficult to be applied to form a word. Under the account of headedness difference, the head of modified compounding words could be determined the most easily, and then verb-object compounding words, subject-predicate words was the most difficult one. In conclusion, the present study indicated that (1) Morphological awareness began to differentiate when children grown up to 6-year-old, and showed the imbalance of development; (2) The types of morphology would influence children’s performance. The best of these three was modified-compound-awareness followed by verb-object awareness, and subject- predicate awareness was the weakest one. It might result from morphological independency and headedness, and strong morphology independence along with explicit headedness were the critical factors that improved the development of compounding morphological structural awareness in Chinese children.

Key words: Chinese, Children, Compounding Morphological Structural Awareness

摘要： 研究旨在考察5、6、7、8岁的汉语儿童在偏正、述宾和主谓三种复合词法意识上的发展状况。词法判断任务的结果发现：5岁组三种词法意识之间无显著差异；6岁和7岁组的偏正意识和述宾意识无显著差异，但均优于主谓意识；8岁组偏正意识优于述宾意识，且二者依然均优于主谓意识。以上结果表明汉语儿童的复合词法意识发展具有不平衡性，由强到弱呈现出偏正>述宾>主谓意识的词法结构效应，这种强弱趋势可能与词法独立性和句法独立性之间的冲突以及复合词的中心性差异有关。

关键词: 汉语 儿童 复合词法意识