Reciprocal Crosslinguistic Relations Between Morphological Awareness and Reading Comprehension in Chinese–English Adolescents and Young Adults

Background We examined the associations between first (L1) and second language (L2) morphological awareness and reading comprehension skills in adolescent and young adult Chinese and English speakers. We hypothesised that crosslinguistically, morphological awareness was mutually related to reading comprehension Methods A total of 117 Chinese–English bilinguals (mean age = 18.33 years, SD = 2.19) completed measures of Chinese character reading, vocabulary, reading comprehension and English decoding, vocabulary and reading comprehension, plus nonverbal reasoning and a demographic and language use questionnaire. Results A baseline model that included age, length of immigration, nonverbal reasoning and within‐language word‐level reading, vocabulary and morphological awareness was compared against alternative structural equation models that included additional one‐way cross‐language paths (i.e., L1 ‐> L2 or L2 ‐> L1) and two‐way paths (i.e., L1 ‐> L2 and L2 ‐> L1) from morphological awareness to reading comprehension. Model comparisons suggested that the reciprocal cross‐language model fit the data best. In the preferred model, Chinese morphological awareness was related to English reading comprehension ( b = 0.15, p = 0.04) and English morphological awareness was related to Chinese reading comprehension ( b = 0.14, p < 0.001). Additionally, Chinese vocabulary ( b = 0.52, p < 0.001) and Chinese morphological awareness ( b = 0.49, p < 0.001) were significant predictors of Chinese reading comprehension ( R 2 = 0.84). Furthermore, English decoding ( b = 0.11, p = 0.001), English vocabulary ( b = 0.56, p = <0.001), English morphological awareness ( b = 0.30, p = <0.001) and nonverbal reasoning ( b = 0.14, p = <0.001) were significant predictors of English reading comprehension ( R 2 = 0.74). Conclusions We discuss the dynamic nature of crosslinguistic relationships and the implications for development and instruction for multilingual learners.