O Morphology, Morphology, Wherefore Art Thou, Morphology? A Call for Research

O Morphology, Morphology, Wherefore Art Thou, Morphology?A Call for Research Peter V. Paul Recently, I have become somewhat obsessed with morphology and am working on a manuscript with a colleague. I ran across a review by Trussell and Easterbrooks (2017), who conducted a narrative review of the literature on morphological knowledge and d/Deaf and hard of hearing students. Their timeframe was 1970 to 2015, and they found and reviewed 13 studies that met their criteria. I also conducted a review, focusing specifically on English morphological awareness and English reading. Although I will not spill the beans now—let's just say that I found that only a few articles had been published since the Trussell and Easterbrooks review. In fact, it was my review that convinced me that a call was warranted for additional research on morphological awareness and d/Deaf and hard of hearing children and adolescents. As I argue briefly later, future investigators need not only to examine morphological knowledge but to consider the type of task used to assess morphological awareness. The Morpheme: A Brief Rendition of the Construct What is a morpheme? Well, for starters, written English is described as a morphophonemic system in which the spelling of words requires an understanding of morphemes and phonemes and adhering to a rule-governed order of letters (i.e., orthography; see, e.g., Crystal, 1995; Matthews, 1991; Treiman, 1998). Granted, I still have a lot to learn about morphology (for a good introduction, see Crystal, 1995), so pardon my brief rendition of this construct. Let me lean on the work of Apel (Apel, 2014, 2017; Apel et al., 2013, 2023) and others (e.g., Nagy et al., 2013) to describe morphemes and their significance. First, a morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in a language. In English, there are free morphemes, which are base words, for example, cat, dog, and girl. These can stand alone as words. Bound morphemes (e.g., -ing, in-), which cannot stand alone as words, are affixes that need to be added to the base words (e.g., walking; incomplete). Affixes can be prefixes (e.g., in-, il-) or suffixes (e.g., -ed, -able). There is also a construct called roots or root words. Most of these act as bound morphemes, which need to be combined with other word parts (e.g., aqua as in aquarium or bene as in benefactor; see McEwan, 2008, at the Reading Rockets website, https://www.readingrockets.org/article/root-words-roots-and-affixes, for additional examples). However, there are some root words that can actually stand alone as words—for example, to borrow from Reading Rockets, scope. Although more research is needed, there seems to be little or no research to support the focus on "roots" as a way to improve morphological awareness. Essentially, roots are not a [End Page 131] part of the oral language of individuals; most individuals—without explicit instruction—are not aware of the root forms in words. There are two other groups of morphemes to discuss briefly: inflectional and derivational morphemes. Inflectional morphemes are suffixes in English, which provide information about time or quantity without changing the meaning or class (form class) of the word. Examples include the following: • -s (for plurals and third-person singular, as in cats and runs, respectively) • -ed (for past tense or past participle, as in liked and has liked, respectively) • -ing (for present or continuous progressive, as in "she is walking") • -er and -est (for comparative and superlative, respectively, as in taller and tallest) Inflectional morphemes can only be suffixes; derivational morphemes, on the other hand, can be prefixes or suffixes. These morphemes change the meaning and/or word or form class. Common examples include work to worker, write to rewrite, love to lovable, and fair to unfair. As a rule, awareness of derivational morphemes can be more difficult or challenging than awareness of inflectional morphemes (e.g., see Apel, 2014, 2017; for d/Deaf and hard of hearing children, see Paul, 2009). However, as discussed later, there are several factors that affect the difficulty of morphological knowledge or awareness. Morphological...