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Morphological awareness involves the ability to manipulate the internal structure of words and reflect on the meaning of the constituents that form the words (Carlisle, 2000). As children grow older, their exposure to morphologically complex words increases. The ability to understand the word formation rules and the meaning of these structures facilitates vocabulary acquisition (Nagy & Anderson, 1984; Tyler & Nagy, 1989; White, Power & White, 1989), and word reading skills (Levesque et al, 2018, Wei et al, 2014). Languages contain compounds and derivative structures, but in different proportions, and so morphological awareness skill development may vary depending on the typological distribution of derivative or compound word in a specific language. For example, as 70% of Chinese words are compound words unlike English and Malay where derivatives are more prevalent (Liu & McBride Chang, 2010), Chinese children tend to do better on compounding tasks, and English children do better at derivative tasks, however, these two groups converge as they mature (Ku & Anderson, 2003). Development of morphological awareness tasks for the different languages in this preregistered study will be adjusted according to the language-specific features of morphological structure. The aim for the study described in this preregistered protocol is to investigate the psychometric properties of the Morphological Awareness task for Singapore. This task includes four versions based on the three official mother-tongue languages of Singapore (Mandarin Chinese, Bahasa Melayu ‘Malay’, and Tamil) and English. The Chinese, Malay and Tamil items were newly developed for a larger scale project, in collaboration with external experts. A Mandarin-Chinese Singaporean bilingual voiced for the Mandarin Chinese version, a Malay-English Singaporean bilingual voiced for the Malay version, and a Tamil-English Singaporean bilingual voiced for the Tamil version of this task. Measuring morphological awareness is based on 3 tasks targeted at developmentally appropriate levels from preschool (kindergarten) to middle primary school. They are the Morphological construction test, Morpheme discrimination test, and Select interpretations test. The first tests the ability to form new words structurally, while the last two test abilities to reflect on meaning based on the word-formation rules. Out of these 3 tasks, for the preschool age group, preschoolers do better at Morphological construction task. One explanation is that this task is guided in its format, and it only tests the ability to recognize patterns in the structural formation of words (Tong, McBride-Chang, 2010, Wei et al 2014). Other than reflecting on the structure of words, reflecting on the meanings of the structural parts of the words is another salient aspect of Morphological awareness. This aspect is more challenging for kindergarten and lower primary children (Ku & Anderson, 2003, Levesque et al, 2018). But between the two tasks that test meaning reflection, the discriminate morphemes task is simpler because it does not require conscious identification of meaning of a specific morpheme. For these reasons, the Select Interpretations Task will be administered to middle primary children (oldest age group), the Discriminate Morphemes test to lower primary children, and the Morphological Construction task will be administered to preschool students. This pre-registered study is a first step to develop a psychometrically sound standardized assessment tool to capture multilingual morphological awareness for Singapore. For the purpose of catering to bilingual children in Singapore, four versions of these tasks are administered to groups of Singaporean children from Nursery (N2) to Primary school (P3) in this study. Each language variation of the Morpheme Construction test contains 20 items. The Discriminate Morpheme test comprises of 20 items for English, Tamil and Malay and 24 items for Mandarin Chinese. Likewise, the Select Interpretations test comprises of 20 items for English, Tamil and Malay and 24 items for Mandarin Chinese. |
