Morphological Processing and Literacy Development

Current Issues and Research

Rachel Berthiaume, Daniel Daigle, Alain Desrochers, Rachel Berthiaume, Daniel Daigle, Alain Desrochers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351858205
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Synthesizing a range of studies on morphological processing from the past 30 years, this edited collection presents the current state of knowledge on morphological processing and defines classroom practices to help students conceptualise the role of morphology in reading, spelling, and vocabulary development. Research has increasingly indicated the importance of morphological tasks in relation to reading, spelling, and vocabulary acquisition in the classroom. Chapter authors present the theoretical considerations guiding morphological processing research to date, address the use of morphology with reference to different populations of learners, and propose effective and innovative instructional strategies for integrating morphology in the classroom.

Part I
Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Morphological Processing

1 A Linguistic Analysis of Word Morphology

Laura M. Gonnerman

Introduction

Morphology in linguistics is the study of word structure. The unit of study is the morpheme, defined as the smallest unit of meaning. A morpheme can be smaller than a word; so, for example, the word trees is made up of two distinct morphemes: tree (a type of plant) and -s (indicating plural). De Saussure (1916) pointed out that the relationship between sound and meaning in language is essentially arbitrary; the sound pattern of the English word tree has nothing in common with the French arbre or the German Baum, yet all three dissimilar patterns denote the same object. The interesting thing about morphology is that it presents a case where the sound-meaning pairing is not arbitrary. The sounds [tri] in treetop, trees, pine tree, and treeless mean the same thing, although the same sounds do not carry the same meaning in the words treat or entry. This chapter deals with the question of what kind of information speakers of a language store about the relationships between words, and how they use this information in producing and comprehending language, and how that knowledge relates to the larger language system.

In the rest of the chapter, I start by briefly outlining some of the major notions that linguists have identified that will be relevant for discussions of morphology in literacy throughout the present book. I also describe some of the major differences between inflectional and derivational morphology. I then discuss approaches to morphology within linguistic theory. I will touch on cross-linguistic differences in morphological systems and describe some types of morphemes that are not commonly found in languages such as English or French. Finally, I will give a brief overview of processing views of morphology.

Important Notions in Morphology

In this section I describe some of the major descriptive notions that are used by linguists and other researchers who study morphology and morphological processing.

A first important distinction is between bound and free morphemes. Bound morphemes are simply those morphemes that cannot stand alone in speech or writing but must be attached to other morphemes. For example, the plural—s in English is a bound morpheme—it cannot stand alone. That is, one can say snakes or lizards to mean many animals, but not just /s/ by itself, to mean lots of something. By contrast, a so-called free morpheme is one that stands alone, such as snake.

A second important notion is a stem or root or base morpheme. Without going into great detail about how these three terms are sometimes differentiated, for our purposes it suffices to say that the stem (or root or base) form is the one that is used to make other word forms. For example, in verb paradigms, English has a very simple system for tense, with the only added inflectional morpheme being the -s that signals third-person singular. Thus, in English, the stem jump is inflected for the third-person singular by adding the suffix -s to form jumps, as in he jumps.

This brings us to the contrast between stems and affixes, the stem being the base morpheme and the affix being the one that is attached, or affixed, to the stem. Affixes can come before the stem, in which case they are known as prefixes, as the re- in redo or rerun (but not rehearse). Affixes that are attached after the stem are called suffixes, such as -ing in running, jumping, and doing (but not herring). A much less common phenomenon is when the affix is inserted within the stem; in this case the affix is known as an infix. English does not have any true infixes, although the emphatic exclamation damn in guaran-damn-tee or abso-damn-lutely gives the basic idea. Finally, there is an affixal form called a circumfix, in which one part of the affix precedes the stem, and another part follows, as in the German past tense, where ge- can precede the stem and -t follows it, as in ge-lach-t (laughed). Infixing and circumfixing are not commonly used as morphological processes cross-linguistically.

Another type of morphological system is one that uses nonconcatenative morphemes. In these systems, the phonemes that make up a single morpheme are separated by the root phonemes. Thus, instead of coming before the stem, as a prefix, or after the stem, as a suffix, the morpheme is intercalated within the stem consonants. Take Hebrew, for example, which uses prefixing, suffixing, and also nonconcatenative word formation processes.

In Hebrew, inflections are often prefixes or suffixes, as they are in English. Therefore, I will concentrate here on derivational morphology where the Hebrew system uses nonconcatenative processes. The basic derivational process in Hebrew takes a root form, which cannot stand alone and function as a word, and adds a verbal template to the root. Roots generally consist of three consonants. For example, taking the root sh-m-r (meaning roughly keeping) and combining it with the verbal pattern [-a-a-] produces the word shamar (watched). There are seven main patterns for forming verbs in Hebrew. The paradigm is not fully productive as, for some roots, some of the patterns are unattested. Also, the verbs formed are not always transparently semantically related to the root. There are also nominal word formation patterns in Hebrew. The nominal system contains many more patterns (about 36), and the patterns are less systematic than the verbal system.

One reason for extending any processing or developmental theory to Hebrew is that if the claim is to apply universally, then this theory needs to be workable for languages like Hebrew and other Semitic languages with morphological systems less conventional than that of English or French. These kinds of languages have traditionally been very difficult to integrate into theories of morphology, and many theorists have developed separate constructs to deal with them (see, e.g., the Morphological Rule Constraint of McCarthy [1981]). Unless one wants to argue that different underlying principles apply to the processing or acquisition of different languages, then these typologically varying systems need to be taken into account in any theorizing.

The last important distinction that is often made is between what are called inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes. Inflectional morphemes are those that are added to stems to change the tense, or aspect, or add some other grammatical dimension. For example, the past tense in English can be signaled with the addition of the suffix -ed to change jump to jumped (he jumped off a bridge last week). Derivational morphemes, on the other hand, form new words and usually change the grammatical category of the stem, such as adding -ness to the adjective happy to derive the noun happiness (note the change in spelling of happy to happi in the derived form). In the section that follows, I will discuss in more detail the major differences between inflections and derivations as they play an important role in many linguistic and psycholinguistic theories of morphology.

Inflectional and Derivational Morphology

Three types of morphological processes are generally recognized: inflectional (e.g., trees), derivational (e.g., treeless), and compounding (e.g., treetop). As noted in the previous section, a distinction is often made between inflectional morphology, on the one hand, and derivational and compounding processes, on the other. I will focus the discussion here on inflections and derivations because compounding processes involve slightly different mechanisms. It is important to discuss the differences between inflectional and derivational morphemes because these types have been shown to behave differently in terms of language processing, impairment, and development. In what follows, I will describe some of the cross-linguistic implications and some of the most relevant distinctions at different levels of the linguistic system.

Typologically, some languages do not have inflectional systems—the so-called isolating languages (Bloomfield, 1933). Mandarin is an example of a language without inflections. Other languages have rich inflectional systems, for example, Finnish. There seem to be no languages, however, that do not have some processes of either derivation or compounding. “There are a considerable number of languages without inflections, perhaps none without compounding and derivation” (Greenberg, 1966, p. 93).

Also, within the neurolinguistic literature, there are aphasic patients who present with impairments to inflectional but not derivational morphology (e.g., Miceli & Caramazza, 1988). Problems with derived forms have also been reported but only in conjunction with problems on inflected forms (Badecker & Caramazza, 1991). Miceli and Caramazza see the dissociation in impairments as reason to postulate two distinct components within the lexicon to deal with these different processes: Derivational Processes Component (DPC) and the Inflectional Processes Component (IPC).

Given these differences in the nature of the IPC and the DPC it seems natural to consider these differences to be reflected in processing distinctions in the language system. In such a case it ought to be possible, in principle, to selectively disrupt one or the other morphological component.

(Miceli & Caramazza, 1988, p. 26)

What is different about inflectional and derivational processes that causes them to be represented with different frequencies across the languages of the world and also to be differentially impaired in brain damage? There are four main areas where differences have been observed: 1) role in syntax; 2) semantic content; 3) formal similarity between stems and related forms; and 4) degree of productivity.

1) Role in Syntax

Typically, words are inflected for concepts like number, gender, case, tense, or aspect. These are relational concepts, showing dependencies between items within a sentence but without substantially changing the meaning of the individual words. This is one reason inflectional processes are often considered part of syntax and inflectional morphemes are sometimes termed “grammatical” morphemes. Derivations, on the other hand, can change the syntactic category of the word to which they apply; for example, adding -er to teach changes the verb to a noun. Derivational morphemes are also often restricted in the grammatical class to which they apply; for example, -er applies only to verbs.

2) Semantic Content

It is often said that inflectional processes do not have a semantic effect on the forms to which they apply, whereas derivational processes do. Or it can be said the inflectional processes have a weaker semantic effect; that is, adding the plural changes the number of cats, but we are still dealing with the same animal, whereas adding a suffix can change the meaning drastically, for example, harm compared to harmless. Also derivations can cause a wider range of meaning changes, and these changes are not always transparent (e.g., serenity is transparent because it is the quality of being serene, but authority is opaque because its relationship to author is not obvious), whereas inflectional changes are synchronically transparent: “the products of inflectional morphology are semantically regular, whereas the products of derivational morphology tend not to be” (Bauer, 1983, p. 28).

3) Formal Similarity

Inflections tend to cause less change in the phonological form of the stem; for example, in bake-baked the vowel stays the same versus serene-serenity, where the vowel changes. Researchers have shown that children have more difficulty learning derived forms when the forms are less phonologically transparent (e.g., Clark & Berman, 1984). In addition, phonologically transparent forms have been shown to produce greater facilitation in priming experiments with adults. For example, hearing the word deletion leads to faster processing of delete compared with an unrelated control prime, and the magnitude of this priming effect is greater than the effect of hearing introduction before responding to introduce (Gonnerman, Seidenberg, & Andersen, 2007).

4) Productivity

There is a common correlation that has been observed: derivational processes are less productive than inflectional, and the productivity is related to both formal and semantic properties of the roots and affixes. Interestingly enough, different researchers have argued for “mirror-image” reasons for the correlation. To Kiparsky, the fact that inflections apply across the board prevents them from acquiring semantic content:

The greater semantic coherence of the general word-formation processes which are ordered at later levels is a consequence of their productivity (as suggested by Aronoff, 1976, p. 45). The fact that they do not require word-by-word specification but apply across the board to a whole category means that there is no foothold for imposing word-specific semantic conditions on them either.

(Kiparsky, 1982, p. 136)

To Bybee, in contrast, the fact that inflections carry little semantic content allows them to apply across the board. “The greater specificity in derivational meaning restricts the applicability of derivational processes. In the case of inflection, then, the lack of lexical restrictions coincides with extreme semantic generality” (Bybee, 1985, p. 86–87).

There also tend to be fewer inflectio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part I Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Morphological Processing
• Part II Morphological Knowledge and Processes
• Part III Implications for Educational Practices
• Index