No discussion of language development would be complete without a mention of morphology; which is why today we’re going to dive in to morphological development in the school age years.
Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words and how they’re formed, including parts such as roots, bases and affixes (Nippold, 2016).
There’s been a debate about whether or not language learning is “complete” after we go through Brown’s stages of development (Lenneberg, 1967).
Most of us who work with the school-aged populations would likely agree that while the “foundation” is there around 5-6 years, morphological development is definitely not finished at that point.
As we grow cognitively, we can do many more things with language as we get older, and this development continues in to adulthood (Dahl, 2004).
But as many of us know, most of the developmental norms charts and resources stop at this point.
Those of us diagnosing children with disabilities that impact language often feel forced to use standardized language assessments that reduce the complexity of language-learning to a standard score.
And while standard scores are extremely valuable; most of us using them are often left wanting more.
We want to know what “normal” is, because we’re asked this question all the time by our colleagues or by parents.
In order to continue this discussion of language development with enough depth to do it justice I’m going to be breaking it down in to separate language skills over a series of articles.
Of course we know that all the components of language overlap and impact each other, but for the purpose of this series I’ll be breaking some of them apart so we can devote enough attention to each.
Today, I’ll talk about morphological development; the understanding of “morphemes”, the units of form and meaning in language.
If you remember from this article, true morphological development starts for most of us in the second year of our lives (Kuder, 2018).
However, as children progress through the school-age years, they develop what’s known as “metalinguistic competence”, which moves morphological development to grow even further.
When children development metalinguistic competence (a.k.a. metalinguistic awareness), they become more aware of the rules and features of language.
When this happens, they become aware that words have parts; and that those parts mean something. This of course makes morphological development possible; so let’s talk about how that happens throughout the school age years.
Kindergarten through Grade 4
Between ages 6-7 children are able to identify endings of words, root words, or use affixes to infer meanings of unfamiliar words.
We also know that inflectional morphology is typically mastered around ages 6-7; which means many first and second graders use correct endings on verbs and nouns in oral language.
We of course may still see some confusion with irregular forms, but we’re seeing rapid progress.
As far as derivational morphology goes, children may appear to struggle with this skill in early Kindergarten; but as they’re learning to read important developments are taking place (Nippold, 2016).
According to a landmark study by Anglin 1993; students can recognize morphemes in grades 1-3; and use morphological knowledge to infer unknown word meanings. I reviewed a study by Apel and Henbest (2016) that supported this claim as well; so we know that while this explicit awareness of word part may still be emerging in Kindergarten, it becomes more apparent as children learn to read.
In grades 3 and 4, children further refine their knowledge of derivational morphology (Nippold, 2016).
Grades 4 through 8
While the big boost in morphological development starts when kids are only two; a large portion of that development is in inflectional morphology.
The greatest improvement in derivational morphology usually happens between grades 4 and 8. This is also the time when most children have switched from “learning to read” to “reading to learn”.
Print exposure plays a key role in morphological development because children not only need to hear words, they need to see them in print. Knowledge of phonology and phonological awareness is necessary in order to read and spell, but it’s not sufficient.
Morphological knowledge is also needed for more complex words because spelling is bound by the rules of morphology.
From grades 4 through 8, children learn to both recognize morphologically complex words, as well as study their parts to infer what unfamiliar words might mean.
A word is “morphologically complex” when it’s made up of two or more morphemes.
For example, the word “ball” only has one free morpheme, so it’s simple.
The word “friend” is also simple. But then when we add the “ly” suffix and change it from a noun to an adverb; it’s now morphologically complex. We can add the suffix “ness”, and turn it back in to a noun to get “friendliness”. We can also add the prefix “un” to change it to the opposite meaning and get, “unfriendliness”.
A study done by Wysocki and Jenkins (1987) showed that many 4th graders could use morphological analysis AND context clues in texts simultaneously to decipher meanings of words they don’t know.
In the same study, the researchers found that children in grade 6 were completely proficient in using these two strategies at once to learn new words. From grades 6 through 8 children further refine their ability to use both context clues and morphological analysis to “teach themselves” new words while they’re reading.
Grades 8 through 12
Morphological development continues to grow as students move in to the high school years.
When students are in grades 10 through 12, a significant amount of growth in the ability to process morphological complex words is happening; partially because of the large amount of difficult content the typical high school student encounters during schoolwork.
Students are also becoming more able to understand that the rules of morphological impact the phonetic structure and the stress placed on syllables; which means that the way we pronounce a morpheme may change if we add or omit an affix.
For example, the morpheme “plenty” is pronounced differently when it’s used in the word “plentiful”, or the morpheme “sign” is pronounced differently when it’s used in the word “resignation”.
The most common complex words children are likely to encounter in school (based on what’s in textbooks) are derived nominal and derived adjectives.
Derived nominals are nouns that originate from verbs or adjectives. Like in the word, “assumption”, which comes from the verb “assume”; or the word “creativity” that comes from the word “creative”.
Derived adjectives are words that originate from nouns and verbs. This could include the word “understandable” that comes from the word “understand”, or the word “merciful” that comes from the word “mercy”.
While younger students may know derived nominals and derived adjectives, the demand increases drastically in high school because these words are seen throughout typical high school textbooks.
We’ll stop here for now, but next on the agenda is to discuss vocabulary. That’s obviously a huge topic, so there will be multiple articles addressing it.
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References
Kuder, S. J. (2018). Teaching students with language and communication disabilities (5th Edition) (The Pearson Communication Sciences and Disorders Series)
Lenneberg, E. H. (1967). Biological foundations of language. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Nippold, M. A. (2016). Later language development: School-age children, adolescents, and young adults
Wysocki, K., & Jenkins, J. R. (1987). Deriving words meanings through morphological generalization. Reading Research Quarterly, 22, 66-81. doi: 10.2307/747721
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