Morphological awareness shows a more robust unique association with reading comprehension than phonological awareness in Chinese children in Grades 3-5.

Reading comprehension in morphosyllabic Chinese draws on coordinated phonological, orthographic, morphological, and broader language knowledge, but the unique associations of morphological and phonological awareness remain uncertain once proximal reading and language skills are considered. 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). The direct coefficient contrast favored morphological awareness (βMA-βPA = 0.158, HC3 p = 0.009; bootstrap 95% CI [0.043, 0.275]). Morphological awareness remained significant across all sensitivity specifications. After influential-case exclusion, phonological awareness also became significant, and the coefficient difference remained significant. The findings identify a larger and more stable unique morphological association with reading comprehension in Chinese children in Grades 3-5, while the smaller phonological association was substantially shared with character-level literacy.