Middle School Learners' Use of Latin Roots to Infer the Meaning of Unfamiliar Words

ABSTRACT

This study investigated how middle school students leverage information about bound Latin roots (e.g., voc in advocate and vociferous) to infer meanings of unfamiliar words, and how instruction may facilitate morphological analysis using roots. A dynamic assessment of morphological analysis was administered to 29 sixth graders (n = 17 intervention students) and 30 seventh graders (n = 18 intervention students). Qualitative analyses of analytic strategies revealed patterns of morphological problem solving that included direct (i.e., direct application of roots to analyze unfamiliar words) and indirect routes (i.e., use of known words that carry the roots to analyze unfamiliar words). Intervention students applied a direct route at higher rates than control students. Correlational analyses revealed a small but significant treatment effect on establishing meaning memory representations for roots and a significant, positive treatment effect for use of roots to infer unfamiliar word meanings. Overall results show promise for use of bound Latin roots for morphological problem solving.

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge Nancy Artz, Michelle Rimby, Cheryl Sandora, and Shelley Tavis for their contributions to data collection. We are thankful to Mr. Raymond Morton for his support of this research. Finally, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for the many substantive comments and suggestions that led to extensive improvements in the article. This work would not be possible without the partnership of administrators, educators, and students in our collaborating school district.

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge the Institute for Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education for its support of the research described in this article (Award R305A100440). The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Institute, and no official endorsement should be inferred.

Notes

1. Semantic transparency is defined as the degree to which the relationship between the word and root meanings can be readily inferred, and was informed by Goodwin, Gilbert, and Cho's (2013) adaption of Nagy and Anderson's (1984) semantic transparency scale. For example, the relation between vert (change) and divert (change directions) may arguably be more easily detected than the relation between an opaque bound root such as riv (from rivus meaning “stream”) and derive, though the relationship is understandable if one learns about the etymology of derive.

2. Phonological transparency is defined as whether the pronunciation of the bound root is intact in the words in which it appears, as informed by Carlisle and Stone (2005).

3. Orthographic stabilty is defined as whether the spelling of the bound root is intact in the words in which it appears, as informed by Carlisle and Stone's definition of “orthographic transparency” (2005).

4. Becker's corpus identifies all morphographs in the 26,000 highest frequency words in English. Becker and colleagues identified 6,531 total “morphographs”—that is bound roots and all stem-words and their derivations. Of these, approximately half appeared only once in the corpus; 2,000 appeared in three to five words; 1,500 appeared in six or more words, and 800 appeared in 10 or more words.