How does morphosyntactic skill contribute to different genres of Chinese writing from grades 3 to 6?: Morphosyntactic Skill

This 4-year longitudinal study examined the extent to which morphological awareness, syntactic processing, working memory (WM) and reading skills predict unique variances developmentally in three genres of Chinese writing (narration, argumentation and exposition) among 246 young Mandarin-speaking children. Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted using the writing performance of three genres at the fourth year as the dependent variables. After controlling for reading skills and WM, morphological awareness was uniquely associated with all three types of writing genres longitudinally, while syntactic processing made a significant longitudinal contribution to narrative and argumentative writing during the earlier years. With the autoregressive effect of writing controlled, WM was uniquely associated with narrative writings across all four years, and with argumentative and expository writing in the later years. Reading skills were uniquely related to concurrent narrative and expository writing.