Development of derivational morphological awareness in anglophone learners of Spanish: A relational knowledge study

Abstract

This article investigated the development of morphological awareness (MA) across three groups of students of Spanish as a second language (SSL) with different levels of proficiency. Four morphological assessment tasks on relational knowledge were designed in a simultaneous cross‐sectional study that differed in two dimensions: complexity level (low vs. high) and type (detection vs. production). The results demonstrate that MA in Anglophone students of SSL shows an early development but that detection tasks improve faster than production tasks. Only productive tasks that are procedurally easy to perform improve over time, whereas more difficult productive tasks do not show better results across three consecutive years of Spanish courses. Limitations in the development of MA in SSL are therefore related to the use of morphological knowledge in difficult productive tasks but not in detection tasks or easier productive tasks. Results have implications for MA pedagogy and MA research

Derivational awareness in late bilinguals increases along with proficiency without a clear influence of the suffixes shared with L1

“…Several studies addressed the matter in bilingual children, who are schooled at least partially in their L2, and showed that morphological awareness also helps the development of a L2 (Altman, Goldstein & Armon-Lotem, 2018;D'Angelo et al, 2017;Kieffer & Lesaux, 2008, 2012Kim et al, 2015). Data regarding adult bilinguals, who learned L2 at school with small exposure to L2, are more recent and the role of morphological awareness in L2 is less evident (Jiang & Kuo, 2019;Koda & Miller, 2018;Kraut, 2015;Sánchez-Gutiérrez & Hernández Muñoz, 2018;Wu & Juffs, 2021).…”

“…-English L2 morphological awareness in French-speaking participants will increase with their English proficiency (see also Jiang & Kuo, 2019;Kraut, 2015;Sánchez-Gutiérrez & Hernández Muñoz, 2018). -An interaction will exist between proficiency and whether the morphological characteristics are shared with French.…”

“…Interestingly, while inflections are given much explicit attention in L2 classes because of the acquisition challenges they cause, the beneficial role of morphological relations is often left implicit (Kotzer, Kirby & Heggie, 2021). Sánchez-Gutiérrez and Hernández Muñoz (2018) recommended including explicit morphological instruction in English–Spanish learners to support the development of morphological awareness abilities (see also Rastle, Lally, Davis & Taylor, 2021).…”

“…For example, they know that -ness can be attached to adjectives but not to verbs, while -able attaches to verbs but not to nouns. This stage can be assessed with a task in which participants are asked to select an acceptable derivation of a given root word among lures (Deng, Shi, Dunlap, Bi & Chen, 2016; Sánchez-Gutiérrez & Hernández Muñoz, 2018). For example, they are asked which derivation of loud is acceptable: loudness, loudable, loudify, or loudment.…”

MorphoLex-FR: A derivational morphological database for 38,840 French words

“…For instance, morphology plays a beneficial role in reading acquisition (e.g., D'Alessio, Jaichenco, & Deacon & Francis, 2017), vocabulary learning (Sparks & Deacon, 2015), spelling (Sánchez-Gutiérrez, 2013) and reading comprehension in children (Deacon, Kieffer, & Laroche, 2014). Morphology has also been shown to continue to benefit word processing (i.e., word reading and word recognition) in children with dyslexia who have not yet mastered whole-word processing (e.g., Marcolini, Traficante, Zoccolotti, & Burani, 2011;Suárez-Coalla, Martínez-García, & Cuetos, 2017) and it is related to higher levels of linguistic proficiency in learners of second/foreign languages (Sánchez-Gutiérrez & Hernández-Muñoz, 2018). Also, neurological patients with semantic deficits such as those presenting with the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia show difficulties in the comprehension and production of morphologically complex words (Auclair-Ouellet, Fossard, Houde, Laforce, & Macoir, 2016;Auclair-Ouellet, Fossard, Laforce, Bier, & Macoir, 2017).…”