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Morphological awareness is a person's implicit and explicit understanding of the smallest units of meaning in a language. It involves the metalinguistic knowledge that words are made up of pieces, such as roots, prefixes, and suffixes. These small units of language are morphemes, and can be words, such as "jump" or "happy" or parts of words, such as "un-" in "unhappy" or "-ed" in "jumped". Morphological awareness plays a role in first- and second-language acquisition.
Early Morphological Development
Brown's Morphemes
Morphological awareness begins with the acquisition of several inflectional morphemes in a relatively standard order, known as Brown's Stages of Morphological Development. There are 5 stages, the first beginning at approximately 12 months with the onset of speech.[1]
| Stage | Age (months) | MLUm | Morphemes acquired | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I | 12 - 26 | 1 - 2 | ||
| II | 27 - 30 | 2 - 2.5 | Present Progressive "-ing"
Prepositions "in" and "on" Regular Plural "s" |
"I Going"
"in bed"/"on chair" "my dolls" |
| III | 31 - 34 | 2.5 - 3 | Irregular Past Tense verb forms
Possessive "-'s" Uncontractible Copula |
"Fell down"
"Mommy's book" "It was Daddy" |
| IV | 35 - 40 | 3 - 3.75 | Articles
Regular Past Tense "-ed" Third Person Regular "s" |
"The ball"
"He jumped" "He likes it" |
| V | 41 - 46 onward | 3.7 - 4.5 | Third Person irregular verb forms
Uncontractible Auxiliary Contractible Copula "-'s" Contractible Auxiliary |
"Mommy went shopping"
"Are you sad?" "He's hungry" "He's going home" |
MLUm above refers to "Mean Length of Utterance in Morphemes". MLU in Morphemes is often used to quantify a child's language development by taking a sample of speech, determining the number of morphemes in each utterance, and calculating the average number of morphemes per utterance. This method has been shown to be a reliable gauge of a child's linguistic development, but alternative methods take the median utterance length. Speech Pathologists utilize various methods for calculating what constitutes an "utterance", taking into account prosody, communication, and phonology.[3]
Wug Test
Jean Berko Gleason famously conducted the Wug Test, which tested young children's ability to produce morphologically correct forms of nonce words - such as "Wug" and its plural "Wugs". This test, conducted with preschool and first-grade students, aged 4 to 7, showed that young children, even pre-literate and in the early stages of literacy acquisition, are aware of morphological rules in the general sense, and were able to apply those rules to words they had never encountered before.[4]
School-age Morphological Development
Between Kindergarten and 12th grade children encounter around 88,700 new words, or around 8 to 11 words per day. around 60% of the new words middle school students encounter in school-related texts are morphologically complex but transparent in construction. [5]
Impact on Literacy
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- ^ Brown, Roger (1973). A first language: The early stages. London: George Allen & Unwin.
- ^ Bowen, C (1998). "Brown's Stages of Syntactic and Morphological Development". Speech-Language-Therapy.com. Retrieved April 24, 2019.
- ^ Bigelow, Katherine (June 28, 2012). "Reliability of the Mean Length of Utterance Measure in Samples of Children's Language". Retrieved April 23, 2019.
- ^ Berko, Jean (1958). "The Child's Learning of English Morphology" (PDF). Word: 150–177.
- ^ Nagy WE, Anderson R (1984). "How many words are there in printed school English?" Reading Research Quarterly.