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| Sensitivity to morpheme structure and word stress in Chinese English learners |
| LI Jun-min |
| School of Foreign Languages, Zhejiang University City College, Hangzhou 310015, China |
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Abstract Two experiments were adopted to probe whether Chinese English- learners, especially college students, have morphological awareness and develop accuracy in their morphophonological processing, and whether English proficiency modulates this. The results of the first experiment suggested that participants experienced greater difficulty in responding to pseudowords constructed with morphological structure (e.g. lamply, or drimbful) than those without (e.g. lampny, or drimbfil), indicating that they do have morphological awareness. In Experiment 2, participants were asked to read pseudo-derived words with a pseudo-stem combined with either a neutral suffix (e.g. chosure-chosureness) or non-neutral suffix (e.g. distone-distonity) to see whether they were able to use the rules of stress assignment. Results showed that metalinguistic knowledge of stress assignment and stress accuracy was significantly related to English proficiency. Both experiments support the claim that Chinese English-learners have morphological awareness and develop morphophonological accuracy and that this can be at quite a sophisticated level for more proficient learners.
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Published: 15 August 2017
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