Influence of Vocabulary Size on Morphological Knowledge of Affixes

Affix knowledge helps learners recognize the meaning of unfamiliar words & expand their vocabulary through the identification of the words that contain them. This study investigates the relationship between the vocabulary size & the affix knowledge of a second language (L2) group of students, & analyzes its influence over some English derivational prefixes & suffixes. Sixty native speakers of Spanish studying EFL were divided into three different groups of vocabulary size before answering an affix knowledge test. The results show there is a significant relationship between vocabulary size & affix knowledge, & indicate that apparently, prefixes are the first category to be acquired by the lowest vocabulary groups, but this trend reverses for the highest vocabulary size group, which presented a significant increase in suffix knowledge. Adapted from the source document