Vocabulary Knowledge and Braille Reading Comprehension in Chinese Students with Blindness: Contributions of Compounding Awareness and Lexical Inferencing

Although lexical inferencing, defined as morpheme-based inference of unfamiliar compound word meanings, is a key contributor to reading development in sighted children, its contribution to Braille reading comprehension among students with blindness remains underexplored, representing an important gap in research on Braille reading development. This study had two aims. First, it aimed to characterize lexical inferencing in Chinese primary school students with blindness by comparing their performance with that of sighted peers. Second, it aimed to examine the associations of lexical inferencing and compounding awareness with vocabulary knowledge and Braille reading comprehension among students with blindness, and to determine whether these associations differed between middle- and upper-grade students. The study included valid data from 101 students with blindness in Grades 3–6 and 142 sighted students in Grades 2–6. Students with blindness completed measures of compounding awareness, lexical inferencing, vocabulary knowledge, and Braille reading comprehension, whereas sighted students completed only the lexical inferencing task. Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted on a sample of students with blindness to examine the relationships among the four skills. Results showed that (1) students with blindness performed lower than sighted peers on lexical inferencing despite grade-related improvement; (2) lexical inferencing significantly predicted both vocabulary knowledge and Braille reading comprehension in middle- and upper-grade students, whereas compounding awareness significantly predicted lexical inferencing; (3) the relative roles of compounding awareness and lexical inferencing differed by grade group. In middle-grade students, both compounding awareness and lexical inferencing contributed to vocabulary knowledge and Braille reading comprehension, with vocabulary knowledge also predicting reading comprehension. In upper-grade students, lexical inferencing remained a significant predictor of both vocabulary knowledge and Braille reading comprehension, whereas compounding awareness no longer directly predicted either outcome. These findings indicate a developmental shift in which compounding awareness is more influential in earlier stages, whereas lexical inferencing plays a more important role in vocabulary and text-level comprehension in later stages.