Table 1_Morphological awareness shows a more robust unique association with reading comprehension than phonological awareness in Chinese children in Grades 3–5.docx

This cross-sectional study examined 361 Mandarin-speaking children in Grades 3–5. Hierarchical regressions predicted sample-standardized reading-comprehension scores after adjustment for grade, sex, school, non-verbal reasoning, decoding, listening comprehension, vocabulary, character dictation, and syntactic awareness.

Inference used HC3 robust standard errors, case-bootstrap confidence intervals based on 5,000 resamples, and sensitivity analyses. After all covariates were entered, morphological and phonological awareness jointly accounted for an additional 2.9% of variance, ΔF(2, 346) = 17.65, p < 0.001. Morphological awareness showed a unique association with comprehension (β = 0.215, p < 0.001), whereas the phonological-awareness coefficient was smaller and non-significant (β = 0.057, p = 0.192).