Research indicates that readers break down complex words into their smallest, meaning-based units (morphemes) when spelling (e.g., Senechal, 2000). However, it remains unclear how morphemes are formed and whether newly formed morphological knowledge (i.e., knowledge of morphemes) is strong enough to support word learning. The current research proposes to address this gap in the literature by investigating how adult readers use recently acquired morphological knowledge when learning compound words. The first morpheme in each of the compound words was a novel non-word. Participants learned the meanings of the novel morphemes (e.g., "breese" = "fish"), and after a one-day delay, participants were re-exposed to those morphemes in novel compound words that contained the novel morpheme that had been learned the previous day ("e.g., breesebin"). The compound words were presented in sentence context that taught participants meanings to the compound words that either (1) were consistent with the meaning of the novel morpheme contained in the compound word (e.g., "breesebin" = "fish storage"); (2) were inconsistent with the meaning of the novel morpheme contained in the compound word (e.g., "breesebin" = "alleyway"); or (3) contained no contextual cues from which the meaning of the compound word could be derived. The current research found that participants were more successful at learning the novel compound words when they were able to use morphological knowledge from the novel word learned on day one to support their learning on day two. This was true for both learning the spellings of words and learning the meanings of words, despite participants receiving no instructions to consider the words' morphological knowledge. These findings support the body of literature that stress the importance of emphasizing morphology during language instruction. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]