의미 투명성과 맥락 강도가 조선족 아동의 중국어 단어 의미 이해에 미치는 영향

Effects of Semantic Transparency and Context on the Understanding of L2 Words in Korean-Chinese Children

An experiment was conducted to investigate the roles of semantic transparency and context in reading L2 words by Korean-Chinese bilingual children in Yanbian, China. Participants were selected from second, fourth, and sixth grade classes and divided into two groups according to L2 proficiency. Participants were given novel L2 compound words and asked to decide the meaning of each word by choosing one among four alternatives. Half of the novel L2 words were semantically transparent and the other half were opaque, and each word was given in a null, weak, or strong contextual sentence. The results revealed that response accuracy was higher for semantically transparent words than semantically opaque words. Contextual information was also found to affect the understanding of word meaning. With strong context, the accuracy to decide the correct meaning of words was higher, except second and sixth graders. For second graders, no contextual effect was found, showing less semantic knowledge and poor skills to use context information, while sixth graders showed significant context effect only for semantically opaque words but not for semantically transparent words, indicating the rich morphological knowledge and skills. In conclusion, the results support that elaborated morphological knowledge is as critical in improving the understanding of L2 words as skills of exploiting contextual information.