Morphological Structure Of Words Research Articles

Implementing a scientifically based educational intervention in mainstream primary schools before and during COVID-19 era: Evidence from Greek-speaking children

BackgroundWhile morphological awareness has been recognized as a fundamental skill in students’ literacy acquisition, experimental evidence is still scarce, especially regarding studies during pandemic. AimThe aim of the study was to present a scientifically based educational intervention of morphological awareness which was implemented in two mainstream primary schools in Greece during COVID-19 era (2020–2021). MethodParticipants were 72 primary school students (3rd/4th Grades) who were divided into an intervention and a control group per class. All students were assessed via tests of intelligence, literacy and language before pandemic. The intervention took place during pandemic in the school classroom of the experimental groups and included a pre-test, a training program and a post-test. The experimental material comprised of compounds which pose particular difficulties to children in terms of spelling and meaning. ResultsThe results showed that the systematic exercise of the morphological structure of words increased significantly students’ spelling and semantic performance, including those with low literacy performance. ConclusionsThese findings underline the importance and feasibility of implementing scientifically based educational interventions in mainstream education during COVID-19 era. Theoretical and practical issues concerning the implementation of hybrid models of educational interventions and scientific research in education are discussed.

Global Perspectives on Morphological Awareness: A Bibliometric Analysis and Visualization from 1991-2021

Morphological awareness, awareness of the morphological structure of words and ability to manipulate that structure, has received global concern as a research focus in recent years. 691 documents from 1991 to 2021 were selected from the database Scopus and analyzed by CiteSpace 5.8.R3. The results are as follows. 1) The number of publications rose linearly from 1991 to 2021. 2) Reference co-citation analysis reveals that morphological awareness research is centralized and references forming the basis of the field are presented. 3) Keyword co-occurrence analysis and cluster view are combined to figure out the research hotspots. 4) Keyword burst map concludes that clinical studies and adult research are emerging trends in the domain. In general, this paper makes a visual, quantitative and extensive review of the research on MA in the last three decades, and proposes future research directions.

Some Tendencies in the Development of the Terminology of Hermeneutics in the English Language

Although terminology is a branch of linguistics with a long history, a number of terminological systems have not been thoroughly analyzed. One of the areas that falls into this category is the terminology of humanitarian subjects because the way their terminology is formed differs from the term formation of STEM disciplines. Sublanguages of humanitarian disciplines quite often borrow general language words, which can be explained by the fact that the area of their studies is related to general rules of society functioning. In the course of transfer from the general language to domain-specific language, the semantic and/or morphological structure of words might undergo modifications. This article analyses the methods of formation of the English terminology of hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is a theory and methodology of text interpretation. One of the distinguishing features of its sublanguage is the fact that it is formed with the use of a considerable number of general language words that are used by text interpreters in a specialized meaning. This paper presents the analysis of the semantic transformations of some of these words after they became part of the sublanguage of hermeneutics.

Stratification effects without morphological strata, syllable counting effects without counts – modelling English stress assignment with Naive Discriminative Learning

Stress position in English words is well-known to correlate with both their morphological properties and their phonological organisation in terms of non-segmental, prosodic categories like syllable structure. While two generalisations capturing this correlation, directionality and stratification, are well established, the exact nature of the interaction of phonological and morphological factors in English stress assignment is a much debated issue in the literature. The present study investigates if and how directionality and stratification effects in English can be learned by means of Naive Discriminative Learning, a computational model that is trained using error-driven learning and that does not make any a-priori assumptions about the higher-level phonological organisation and morphological structure of words. Based on a series of simulation studies we show that neither directionality nor stratification need to be stipulated as a-priori properties of words or constraints in the lexicon. Stress can be learned solely on the basis of very flat word representations. Morphological stratification emerges as an effect of the model learning that informativity with regard to stress position is unevenly distributed across all trigrams constituting a word. Morphological affix classes like stress-preserving and stress-shifting affixes are, hence, not predefined classes but sets of trigrams that have similar informativity values with regard to stress position. Directionality, by contrast, emerges as spurious in our simulations; no syllable counting or recourse to abstract prosodic representations seems to be necessary to learn stress position in English.

Phonological instantiation of grammatical gender in the course of production is sensitive to words' internal structure.

Research on the gender-congruency effect in speech production across languages suggests that access to grammatical gender during production is modulated by language-specific properties. The present study extends this line of research by seeking evidence for linguistic idiosyncratic influence on gender processing, however, from a within language comparison. Accordingly, it investigated the processing of gender information of Hebrew inanimate nouns from a foreign origin that do not have the typical morphologically complex Semitic structure of Hebrew nouns. The findings were evaluated in relation to previous findings derived from typical native Hebrew nouns. Gender processing was studied through the picture-word-interference (PWI) paradigm for estimating the gender-congruency effect induced by presenting a spoken distractor word of the same or of a different gender of the picture to be named. Across two experiments naming latency, for bare nouns (Exp. 1) and noun phrases (Exp. 2) revealed a different pattern of results from the pattern previously found for typical native inanimate Hebrew nouns-an inhibitory gender-congruency effect for feminine nouns only, but no congruency effect for masculine nouns. The unique pattern observed for this group of words reflects the high sensitivity of the linguistic system, in terms of gender processing, to the basic morphological structure of words. Thus, even within a language, the linguistic processor accommodates itself to item-specific properties. It is suggested that the specific pattern of the results reflects the attempt of the system to assimilate deviant forms within existing procedures on the basis of a flexible criterion of similarity.

The impact of a naturalistic intervention on preschool children’s morphological awareness development

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a morphological awareness intervention delivered by preschool teachers in the naturalistic setting of their classrooms. The participants were 162 Portuguese children, attending kindergarten who were allocated as groups to experimental and control conditions. The former group was the object of six-weeks morphological awareness intervention anchored on explicit discussions about the morphological structure of words appearing in selected storybooks. The control group received normal curriculum activities. Results showed strong to high effect sizes on morphological awareness post-test abilities of children in the experimental group related to identifying words of the same “family”, interpreting the meaning of stems and affixes in morphologically structured pseudowords and finding the base word in derived or inflected stimuli, after controlling for age, cognitive ability, vocabulary, pre-test phonological and morphological results. The relevance of developing tools that help preschool children to consciously manipulate morphemes as meaningful building blocks of words, in partnership with preschool teachers, is proposed.

A Hybrid Deep Dependency Parsing Approach Enhanced With Rules and Morphology: A Case Study for Turkish

Fully data-driven, deep learning-based models are usually designed as language-independent and have been shown to be successful for many natural language processing tasks. However, when the studied language is not high-resource and the amount of training data is insufficient, these models can benefit from the integration of natural language grammar-based information.We propose two approaches to dependency parsing especially for languages with restricted amount of training data. Our first approach combines a state-of-the-art deep learning-based parser with a rule-based approach and the second one incorporates morphological information into the parser. In the rule-based approach, the parsing decisions made by the rules are encoded and concatenated with the vector representations of the input words as additional information to the deep network. The morphology-based approach proposes different methods to include the morphological structure of words into the parser network. Experiments are conducted on three different Turkish treebanks and the results suggest that integration of explicit knowledge about the target language to a neural parser through a rule-based parsing system and morphological analysis leads to more accurate annotations and hence, increases the parsing performance in terms of attachment scores. The proposed methods are developed for Turkish, but can be adapted to other languages as well.

Η σχέση της μουσικής εκπαίδευσης με τις φωνολογικές και αναγνωστικές δεξιότητες μαθητών προσχολικής και πρώτης σχολικής ηλικίας

The aim of the study was to evaluate the effect of the training of morphological awareness of spelling words by 27 students following 4th and 6th grades of a primary school. They were compared with a group of 26 classmates who did not take part in the intervention. All students were assessed via standardized tests of spelling and reading comprehension and non-standardized tests of analogy and meaning of compounds. The intervention included a pre-test, an educational program and a post-test. Experimental material entailed compound words categorized into two conditions of morphophonological transparency (transparent/ non-transparent) and two conditions of compositionality (Modern Greek/Ancient Greek morphemes). Results showed that the systematic exercise of the morphological structure of words improved students' spelling performance in every compound type. Considerably, non-transparent items entailing ancient morphemes received the highest gains, where students presented the lowest performance before intervention. These findings underline the importance of morphological awareness in the acquisition of spelling of morphologically complex vocabulary, whose teaching is important in the highest grades of primary school.

Η επίδραση των μορφοφωνολογικών αλλαγών στην καλλιέργεια της ορθογραφικής δομής των σύνθετων λέξεων: μια μελέτη παρέμβασης

The aim of the study was to evaluate the effect of the training of morphological awareness of spelling words by 27 students following 4th and 6th grades of a primary school. They were compared with a group of 26 classmates who did not take part in the intervention. All students were assessed via standardized tests of spelling and reading comprehension and non-standardized tests of analogy and meaning of compounds. The intervention included a pre-test, an educational program and a post-test. Experimental material entailed compound words categorized into two conditions of morphophonological transparency (transparent/ non-transparent) and two conditions of compositionality (Modern Greek/Ancient Greek morphemes). Results showed that the systematic exercise of the morphological structure of words improved students' spelling performance in every compound type. Considerably, non-transparent items entailing ancient morphemes received the highest gains, where students presented the lowest performance before intervention. These findings underline the importance of morphological awareness in the acquisition of spelling of morphologically complex vocabulary, whose teaching is important in the highest grades of primary school.

МОРФОЛОГИЧЕСКИЙ СОСТАВ СЛОВА В СОВРЕМЕННОМ АНГЛИЙСКОМ ЯЗЫКЕ

In the article “Morphological structure of words in Modern English” the author conducted research on the study of the Morphological structure of words in the process of learning Modern English. In this article, the author describes the morphological structure of the word. They are: 1) simple words; 2) compound words; 3) words that consist of the same root and never change their meaning; 4) words that are obscured by various additions to the derivative; 5) words formed with the help of various suffices; 6) affixes that change the form of the word; 7) abbreviations. A morpheme is a small part of a word. A morpheme has an independent meaning. A morpheme can be considered the root of the word. The word itself cannot be considered a morpheme. Affixes are divided into prefixes and suffixes. Both – prefixes and suffixes can change the meaning of the word. Key words: suffix, prefix, accent, structure, participate, separate, base

Does morphological structure modulate access to embedded word meaning in child readers?

Beginning readers have been shown to be sensitive to the meaning of embedded neighbors (e.g., CROW in CROWN). Moreover, developing readers are sensitive to the morphological structure of words (TEACH-ER). However, the interaction between orthographic and morphological processes in meaning activation during reading is not well established. What determines semantic access to orthographically embedded words? What is the role of suffixes in this process? And how does this change throughout development? To address these questions, we asked 80 Italian elementary school children (third, fourth, and fifth grade) to make category decisions on words (e.g., is CARROT a type of food?). Critically, some target words for no-answers (e.g., is CORNER a type of food?) contained category-congruent embedded stems (i.e., CORN). To gauge the role of morphology in this process, half of the embedded stems were accompanied by a pseudosuffix (CORN-ER) and half by a non-morphological ending (PEA-CE). Results revealed that words were harder to reject as members of a category when the embedded stem was category-congruent. This effect held both with and without a pseudosuffix, but was larger for pseudosuffixed words in the error rates. These results suggest that orthographic stems are activated and activation is fed forward to the semantic level regardless of morphological structure, followed by a decision-making process that might strategically use suffix-like endings.

الوعي الصرفي المبكر وأثره في بناء الكفاية المعجمية لدى المتعلمين: دراسة لسانية عصبية

Given its mechanisms that can help the learner develop the strategy of analyzing the morphological structure of words, Morphological Awareness plays a vital role in the process of acquiring lexical items and organizing lexical memory. Furthermore, it not only renders the representation of linguistic units less confusing but also enables us to apprehend how it functions and how it is organized within the lexicon as well. Thus, this will eventually triggers the mental mechanism responsible for building the linguistic ability of learners. That is to say, cognizing about how the mental lexicon works can inevitably help us answer various questions regarding the organizational engineering of the linguistic levels of the word in the mind as well as the mechanisms involved in the process of comprehension and production. Thus, it can be said that morphological awareness plays a significant role in building lexical competence, particularly that is related to the morphological characteristics which characterize the Arabic language through the perception of its modes of operation and its organization in the mental lexicon.

Sensitivity to word structure in adult Hebrew readers is associated with microstructure of the ventral reading pathways

Skilled readers differ in their sensitivity to morphological word structure, which captures useful regularities in the mapping between written word forms and their meaning. We recently showed that sensitivity to morphological information in adult English readers is associated with the ventral reading pathways, bilaterally. It remains unclear, however, whether this association is specific to the English writing system. To shed light on this question, we investigated whether the associations between the ventral reading pathways and morphological sensitivity to word structure generalize across languages with different orthographies and morphological systems. To this end, we assessed neurocognitive correlations between white matter structural properties and morphological sensitivity in Hebrew, a Semitic language where morphemes are combined in a non-linear manner. We used diffusion MRI (dMRI) to segment ventral and dorsal tracts of interest in a sample of 43 adult Hebrew readers, who also completed a behavioral language assessment battery that included a morphological task. Significant correlations were found between morphological sensitivity and properties of bilateral ventral, but not dorsal, tracts. These correlations remained significant after controlling for measures of vocabulary and word reading, demonstrating their specificity to the morphological task. The current findings in Hebrew show striking similarity to prior findings in English. Our results support the view that morphological information contributes to lexical access along the ventral pathways, across orthographies and morphological systems.

Differences and similarities of root and derivational forms of antonymic adjectives in two languages

In this paper it is discussed and highlighted some structural and functional patterns, multiaspectness and usage of antonyms in morphological structure of words and according to their root and derivational forms antonymic adjectives were analyzed in two languages, namely in English and Russian.

Cultivating morphological awareness improves reading skills in fifth-grade Hebrew readers

The effectiveness of an intervention program aimed at improving morphological awareness was evaluated in Hebrew-speaking poor readers in Grade 5. The 12-week intervention in small groups focused on learning morphological structure of words by identifying, decomposing, and constructing morphologically complex words. Results were compared with a comparison group of similarly poor readers that participated in the school’s reading support program focused on reading comprehension strategies. The intervention group improved morphological awareness to a greater extent than the comparison group and also showed a clear advantage in their reading accuracy and reading comprehension. The results suggest that morphological instruction develops awareness of the morphemic structure of words that contributes to extracting meaning from texts.

Morphological Word Embedding for Arabic

Word embedding has opened new and exciting avenues for understanding and processing languages. The simple yet effective word embedding models rapidly became a dominant building block for Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications as they impressively encode linguistic similarities and syntactic regularities between words. However, ignoring the morphological structure of words degrades its performance when applied to languages with complex morphology like Arabic. In this paper, we investigate enhancing Arabic word embedding by incorporating morphological annotations to the embedding model. We further tune the generated word vectors to their lemma forms using linear compositionality to generate lemma-based embedding. To assess the effectiveness of our model, we perform evaluation using Arabic analogy, sentiment and subjectivity analysis. Our results show improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods for Arabic word embedding.

The development of morphological representations in young readers: a cross-modal priming study.

The way children organize words in their memory has intrigued many researchers in the past 20 years. Given the large number of morphologically complex words in many languages, the influence of morphemes on this organization is being increasingly examined. The aim of this study was to understand how morphemic information influences English-speaking children's word recognition. Children in grades 3 and 5 were asked to complete a lexical decision priming task. Prime-target pairs varied in semantic similarity, with low (e.g., belly-bell), moderate (e.g., lately-late), and high similarity relations (e.g., boldly-bold). There were also word pairs similar in form only (e.g., spinach-spin) and in semantics only (e.g., garbage-trash). Primes were auditory and targets were presented visually. Analyses of children's lexical decision times revealed graded priming effects as a function of the convergence of form and meaning. These results indicate that developing readers do not necessarily need to lexicalize morphological units to facilitate word recognition. Their ability to process the morphological structure of words depends on their ability to develop connections between form and meaning.

Constructing a paraphrase database for agglutinative languages

Paraphrase databases (PPDBs) are valuable resources for applications that use natural language processing (NLP) technology. In order to construct a high-quality PPDB for agglutinative languages, we propose a phrasal paraphrase extraction method; namely, affix modification-based bilingual pivoting method (AMBPM). AMBPM is suitable for agglutinative languages because it addresses the problems of lexical data sparsity and of not considering morphological word structure. In addition, we propose “improved AMBPM,” which is an improvement on AMBPM by addressing the problem of extracting incorrect stem paraphrase pairs caused by low semantic content stems (LSCSs) by using a rule-based filtering approach. In our experiments on AMBPM, we evaluate AMBPM and compare two state-of-the-art paraphrase extraction methods: the syntactic constraints-based bilingual pivoting method (SCBPM) and word embedding method. In the experiments on improved AMPBM, we evaluate our method and compare the resulting PPDB with four types of databases; PPDB constructed by using the original AMBPM, two PPDBs constructed by using two types of word-embedding-based methods (stem embedding and phrase embedding), and an existing thesaurus. The comparison is performed by using two NLP applications: sentential paraphrase generation and a question answering (QA) system. The experimental results demonstrate that, AMBPM outperforms the state-of-the-art paraphrase extraction methods. In addition, the improved AMBPM, which uses a rule-based filtering method, significantly improves AMBPM. Moreover, although a small amount of training data was used with no aid from linguistic resources, the PPDB constructed with the improved AMBPM is more useful than the four databases for the agglutinative language used in our study. We also publicized the Korean PPDB that was constructed using the improved AMBPM.

The influence of the morphological structure of words on the dynamics of handwriting in adults and fourth and sixth grade children

Grapheme and syllable units have been shown to influence the dynamics of handwriting in adults and children, but the influence of morphemes remains to be clarified. We tested the ability of French-speaking adults and fourth and sixth grade children to process the morphological structure of words during writing. They were asked to copy three types of words on a digitizer: morphologically complex words, morphologically simple words matched for the bigram at the syllabic boundary, and morphologically simple words matched for the bigram at the morphemic boundary. Latencies were shorter for morphologically complex words than for simple words only in adults. Requiring individuals to process morphological structure increased the time taken to write the letter before a morphemic boundary in adults and sixth graders. In contrast, fourth graders wrote the letter before the syllabic boundary more quickly for complex words than for simple words. These results indicate that words are represented in a decomposed form in the lexicon, and that the morphological structure of words regulates the dynamics of handwriting.

Contributions of Letter-Speech Sound Learning and Visual Print Tuning to Reading Improvement: Evidence from Brain Potential and Dyslexia Training Studies.

We use a neurocognitive perspective to discuss the contribution of learning letter-speech sound (L-SS) associations and visual specialization in the initial phases of reading in dyslexic children. We review findings from associative learning studies on related cognitive skills important for establishing and consolidating L-SS associations. Then we review brain potential studies, including our own, that yielded two markers associated with reading fluency. Here we show that the marker related to visual specialization (N170) predicts word and pseudoword reading fluency in children who received additional practice in the processing of morphological word structure. Conversely, L-SS integration (indexed by mismatch negativity (MMN)) may only remain important when direct orthography to semantic conversion is not possible, such as in pseudoword reading. In addition, the correlation between these two markers supports the notion that multisensory integration facilitates visual specialization. Finally, we review the role of implicit learning and executive functions in audiovisual learning in dyslexia. Implications for remedial research are discussed and suggestions for future studies are presented.