The contribution of morphological awareness to vocabulary among L1 and L2 French-speaking 4th-graders
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The contribution of morphological awareness to vocabulary among L1 and L2 French‑speaking 4th‑graders Anila Fejzo1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The present study examines the concurrent relationship between morphological awareness and vocabulary breadth and depth after accounting for the effect of other potential contributors. A sample of French-speaking fourth-grade children who spoke either French at home (L1) (n = 55) or another language (L2) (n = 85) completed a number of tests assessing vocabulary breadth, vocabulary depth, morphological awareness, phonological awareness, word reading fluency, word spelling, and nonverbal intelligence. The results showed that morphological awareness was strongly correlated with vocabulary breadth and depth for L1 and L2 participants. Moreover, hierarchical regression analyses indicated that after controlling for one dimension of vocabulary, phonological awareness, word reading fluency, word spelling, age and nonverbal intelligence, morphological awareness explained significant variance in the outcomes on the other dimension of vocabulary for L2 participants. However, the magnitude of the contribution of morphological awareness remained significant in the prediction of vocabulary depth for L1 children only. This paper highlights the implications for research and educational practice of our findings. Keywords L1 and L2 French-speaking children · Morphologically complex words · Morphological awareness · Vocabulary breadth · Vocabulary depth
Introduction By the age of nine, children are expected to learn from text. Their understanding of text relies essentially on general knowledge of the world and on linguistic knowledge, with word knowledge assuming a key role over time (Perfetti & Stafura, * Anila Fejzo [email protected] 1
Département de didactique des langues, Facultés des sciences de l’éducation, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), Case postale 8888, succursale Centre‑ville, Montréal, QC H3C 3P8, Canada
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2014). Children in the later elementary school years encounter new words in text, the majority of which are comprised of two or more morphemes. Morphemes are the smallest meaningful parts of a word (e.g., a-phone, voice-less). Knowledge of constituent morphemes helps readers to infer the meaning of polymorphemic words, up to 60% (Nagy and Anderson, 1984). Indeed, extant data indicate that children chunk polymorphemic words by morpheme and use their knowledge of morphemes (e.g., a-, less and phone, voice, for aphone) to understand and learn new words (Anglin, 1993). The ability to analyse the internal structure of words at the morpheme level (Carlisle, 1995) and knowledge about morphemes and their concatenation rules are referred to as morphological awareness (Kuo & Anderson, 2006). A growing body of studies reveals a relationship between word knowledge and morphological awareness. However, we have yet to fully flesh out our understanding of the relationship between the two, a relationship in which the complexity of vocab
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