A golden triangle? Reciprocal effects among morphological awareness, vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension in Chinese children

Morphological awareness, vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension are intertwined and develop together in Chinese children. This study simultaneously examined the reciprocal relationships between these three skills in a 4-year longitudinal sample of 142 third-grade Chinese-speaking students. After controlling for non-verbal intelligence, rapid automatized naming, phonological awareness, orthographic awareness, and word reading at the initial level, the cross-lagged model results showed that (1) morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge were significantly related to each other in grades 3 to 4, while no reciprocal longitudinal relationship between morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge emerged in grades 4 to 6; (2) morphological awareness in grade 3 did not have a predictive effect on reading comprehension in grade 4, but morphological awareness in grade 4 had a significant effect on reading comprehension in grade 6. Reversely, reading comprehension was a stable predictor of later morphological awareness in grades 3 to 4 and grades 4 to 6; and (3) there were bidirectional predictive relationships between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension in grades 3 to 4 and grades 4 to 6. These findings indicate the symbiotic associations between morphological awareness, vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension, and highlight the dynamic and reciprocal nature of these three skills in Chinese children.