An important part of the grammatical proficiency of students learning Turkish as a foreign language is the use of verb complements in terms of case suffixes used with verbs. The suffixes that determine the relations between nouns and verbs that make up the two main word categories of Turkish are case suffixes. Noun case suffixes, whose main…

Understanding text in a second language can be particularly challenging. The authors explored the contribution of morphological awareness in children's first and second languages to development in second-language reading comprehension. Critically, the authors examined the role of a skill that might be at the heart of these cross-linguistic…

A letter-search task was used to test the hypothesis that affixes are chunked during morphological processing and that such chunking might operate differently for prefixes and suffixes. Participants had to detect a letter target that was embedded either in a prefix or suffix (e.g., "R" in "propoint" or "filmure") or…

Morphological processing by French children was investigated in two experiments. The first showed that second and third graders read pseudowords such as "chat-ure" ("cat-ish") composed of an illegally combined real stem and real derivational suffix faster and more accurately than they read matched pseudowords composed of a pseudostem and a real…

We examined whether French third- and fifth-grade children rely on morphemes when recognizing words and whether this reliance depends on word familiarity. We manipulated the presence of bases and suffixes in words and pseudowords to compare their contribution in a lexical decision task. Both bases and suffixes facilitated word reading accuracy and…

This cross-linguistic comparison of metalinguistic development in French and English examines early ability to manipulate derivational suffixes in oral language games as a function of chronological age, receptive vocabulary, and year of schooling. Data from judgment and production tasks are presented for children aged between 5 and 8 years in…

In the present study, we looked at cross-modal priming effects produced by auditory presentation of morphologically complex pseudowords in order to investigate semantic integration during the processing of French morphologically complex items. In Experiment 1, we used as primes pseudowords consisting of a non-interpretable combination of roots and…

Outlines the history of the terms "derivation,""affix," and "prefix," and of the corresponding grammatical notions, from their origins in the ancient Latin and Hebrew grammars to present day usage. Discusses concepts developed by classic and medieval philosophers on grammatical terminology and theory. (MES)

Discusses recent trends in neologisms in French suffixes. (AM)

Discusses paronyms, with reference to translation, and related forms such as synonyms, polysemes, and false cognates. (AM)

Presents two systems of word derivation. (Text is in French.) (AM)

The definition of the suffix "-ard" as giving a negative or pejorative meaning to a word is disputed, and it is proposed that the suffix is simply a particular, socially marked form of expression. (MSE)

Special issue on orthography. (DD)

A study of the extent to which Spanish and French noun cognates in a 15,000-word corpus have the same or different grammatical gender is presented, and a list of about 750 cognates with differing genders is included. (MSE)

The success of the suffixes "-tique" and "-ciel" in invading the French language in the form of neologisms is examined. An interview with a specialist in linguistics and information sciences concerning the development and usage of these suffixes is included. (MSE)