Morphology and Vocabulary Acquisition Vocabulary

Morphology and Vocabulary Acquisition

Vocabulary empowers a person when it comes to expressing oneself. The vast and better the vocabulary the more expressive and articulate the person will be, This is the reason why vocabulary acquisition is so important for language learners that different methods are adopted to facilitate and expedite vocabulary learning. Morphology is also one way of facilitating this process. Understanding morphemes and developing morphological skills, the ability to recognize and use morphemes, to comprehend words and the relationships between words (and sentences and paragraphs) are no doubt important for learner as also shown by the researches. However, while analyzing a particular method different aspects like human cognitive, social, and behavioral aspects should be considered. Drawing conclusion just on the basis of cognitive aspect of learning would not validate the results. Most of the researches related to the importance and role of morphology have had their focus on cognitive aspects and other important social aspects were ignored. "Researchers have only begun to unweave a few strands of the complex interplay of constitutional and social environmental factors in accounting for the development of language in children"(Dixon & Smith, 2000).

The age differences also play a very important role in language learning. Adults have a different way of learning than children. Similarly special children may have different needs than normal children. While children's awareness and use of function words may develop early, their ability to process these types of words in the rapid automatic way manifested by adults does not develop until much later. So, use of morphology might be appropriate for a certain age group that uses simple words and sentences than another group the use complex and less frequent words with varying grammatical uses. Sometimes words may be assisting while they also may confuse. For example, the 'ea' in 'heal' and 'health', though pronounced differently, preserves the morpheme 'heal' in both words and so allows the reader to connect the concept of 'health' to the concept of 'heal' or it could confuse the young learners due to difference in pronunciation.

Also different cultures and different regions have their own peculiar requirements. For example, a method that works well in United States of America may not work that well in a country like Malaysia. "With regard to lexical ambiguity, the rich inflectional morphology of Italian makes it relatively easy to distinguish between nouns, verbs, and other grammatical classes. In contrast, the sparse grammatical morphology of English means that nouns, verbs, and other word classes often sound alike and must be disambiguated by context (the comb vs. To comb), or by prosodic cues (to record vs. The record)" (Bates, Devescovi & Wulfeck, 2001).