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WORD-KNOWLEDGE DEVELOPMENT IN CHINESE AS A HERITAGE LANGUAGE LEARNERS

A Comparative Study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2016

Haomin Zhang  and
Keiko Koda
Haomin Zhang*
Affiliation:
Carnegie Mellon University
Keiko Koda
Affiliation:
Carnegie Mellon University
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Haomin Zhang, Modern Languages, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. E-mail: haominz@andrew.cmu.edu
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Abstract

This exploratory study aimed to examine whether early exposure to Chinese as a heritage language (CHL) provides facilitation in word-knowledge development in collegiate CHL learners by comparing word-level subskills, including oral vocabulary knowledge, print vocabulary knowledge, morphological awareness, and lexical inferencing ability, between CHL learners and non-CHL learners. Sixty-two collegiate intermediate-level Chinese learners including 37 CHL learners and 25 non-CHL learners participated in this study. Drawing on multivariate analyses, the study found that CHL learners outperformed non-CHL learners on oral vocabulary knowledge, morphological awareness, and lexical inferencing ability, but not on print vocabulary knowledge. In both groups of learners, print vocabulary knowledge was the strongest predictor of lexical inferencing ability. While oral vocabulary knowledge and print vocabulary knowledge were highly correlated in non-CHL learners, they were more distinct constructs in CHL learners. These findings seem to suggest that early exposure to spoken Chinese enhances the development of oral vocabulary knowledge and morphological awareness in CHL learners. Importantly, the latter appears to enhance the formation of the connection between oral vocabulary knowledge and print knowledge.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 201 - 223
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

This study was funded by the Small Research Grant of the Department of Modern Languages, Carnegie Mellon University. We would like to thank the SLA faculty and doctoral students at Carnegie Mellon University for their insightful comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank Feng Xiao, Qiong Li, Yanjun Liu and Ziran Huang for their coordination in data collection. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to the SSLA editors and anonymous reviewers whose suggestions greatly improved our manuscript. All remaining errors are our own.

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