Developing the skill to form derivatives is a slow incremental process even for native speakers of English, starting in elementary school and continuing through high school. In fact, it appears to be a universally challenging area of the lexicon. Nevertheless, studies have shown that it is one of the most important skills to possess for a learner…

English as a Foreign Language (EFL) freshman students at the College of Languages and Translation received direct instruction in adjective-forming suffixes, then they took an immediate and a delayed test. Error analysis showed that 36% of the responses were left blank or the subjects duplicated the stimulus word. In 32% they mismatched the word…

There have been several recent works dealing with the Russian "root system." Most of these works operate on the claim that vocabulary-building in advanced Russian classes may be accelerated by a mastery of the systems of derivational morphology. Townsend's "Russian Word Formation," Gribble's "Russian Root List," and…

This study investigated sensitivity to morphological, semantic, and syntactic cues to grammatical gender among 64 students of college-level Italian. Results showed sensitivity to cues in word-final phonemes, but low awareness of gender associations of derivational suffixes. Students had more difficulty dealing with multiple cues, particularly when…

A total of 196 Latino bilingual students in grades 4, 6, and 8 were asked to give the Spanish equivalent for English words, some of which had derivational and inflectional suffixes. The results indicated that the students' ability to translate cognates increased with age above and beyond any increase in their vocabulary knowledge in Spanish and…