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J. Indian Assoc. Child Adolesc. Ment. Health 2018; 14(2):66-92
Original Article
Measuring the morphological language system of indian school-going adolescents using a
novel derivational suffix task
Jayashree S. Bhat, Sudhin Karuppali
Address for correspondence: Dr. Sudhin Karuppal, Associate Professor, Dept of Audiology &
Speech Language Pathology, Kasturba Medical College, Manipal Academy of Higher Education
Mangalore. Email:[email protected]
Abstract
Background: Morphological processing are higher-order abilities which includes an implicit
processing of the morphological language. Tasks that can expose the morphological framework
of an individual requires to be administered with utmost precision.
Aims: With the research in adolescent language in India being an unexplored area, the present
study attempts to develop a derivational suffix task to assess the morphological system of school
going Indian adolescents.
Methods: The research followed a two-stage cluster random sampling design with a total of 432
participants between 10-16 years of age. The participants were recruited from English-medium
schools based on a selection criteria. The development of the task followed 3 stages. Stage I
comprised of construction of the task along with pilot study; Stage II included the administration
of the developed task; Stage III focused on establishing test validity and reliability measures.
Results: The mean and SD of the scores of the task of the adolescents (typicals and disordered)
were calculated. The test-retest reliability of the items was measured using Kappa statistics.
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Intra-class correlation coefficient was done to determine the agreement between the total scores
of the task. Mann Whitney Test was done for the items and total scores of each age group. ROC
analysis was performed to determine the sensitivity and specificity.
Conclusions: The developed task is a norm and criterion-referenced test which can be used to
identify adolescents with language disorders.
Key words: morphology, adolescent, language, task, derivation
Introduction
Morphology being the study of word structure and its elements (morphemes) contributes to the
meaning of the word itself. The conscious awareness of the morphemic structure of words, and
their ability to manipulate and reflect on that structure can be termed as morphological
processing[1]. According to Kuo and Anderson, morphological processing is a higher-order
ability, more than an ability to encode or decode morphemes[2]. Morphologically complex
words comprise of both lexical and derivational morphemes [3]. Derivational morphemes
comprise of affixes that are allocated to lexical morphemes forming the root word, thus creating
new words. Some of the prefixes include un-, pre-, re-, and super-. Whereas, some of the
suffixes include -y, -er, -er, -est and –ness. Two different types of complex morphological words
do exist - derived adjectives and derived nominal. By adding a suffix such as –ness to the
adjective sad, creates the noun ‘sadness’. Likewise, adding the suffix –ful to the noun mercy,
generates the adjective ‘merciful’. Hence, derived adjective scan be produced by creating
adjectives from verbs and nouns; whereas derived nominals can be produced by creating nouns
from verbs and adjectives. Studies have reported that such derived nominals and adjectives have
been used to teach subjects in the upper-elementary grades and throughout college [4].
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While young children comprehend how inflectional morphemes are attached to words; older
children in upper elementary schools continue to progress in the comprehension of the relation of
derivational morphemes to words [5]. Derivational suffixes deliver information pertaining to the
syntactic and semantic aspects, in turn conveying a subtle distinction. They are found to
generally pose the greatest challenge [6] in academic based learning. According to Alegre and
Gordon, suffixed words are represented as whole words once they attain certain level of
occurrence [7]. These words that exist in reading resources pertaining to the school curriculum,
occurs with an increasing frequency as children progress through their grade levels, thereby
gaining fresh information [8]. Ebbers noted that the textbooks of the intermediate and secondary
grades contained more morphologically complex words than the primary texts [9].
The development of morphological awareness with exposure to written and oral modalities have
grabbed interest on its contribution towards reading ability [10–14] and reading proficiency in
different populations, which includes diverse and typical learners [15]. Since reading
comprehension is related to word knowledge, the curriculum becomes more useful in learning
complex morphological words which is a key feature of the literate lexicon [8]. Thus it is
imperative that children identify the meanings of thousands of complex morphological words
[3], especially when they are reading books on social studies, science, and mathematics which
often contain challenging vocabulary [16].Jarmulowicz and Taranhave indicated that little is
known about factors that influence the typical development of derivational morphology [17].
Tasks pertaining to morphological awareness assess production, decomposition, or judgment
abilities. In a judgment task[18,19], the participant is required to make a choice, without
manipulating the structure of the word or applying any morphological analysis. A decomposition
task however requires the participant to identify the correct root word of a given derivation or
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inflection. In contrast to this, a production task assesses the ability to produce word derivations
applying morphological analysis[20]. Here participants were given the root word and were
instructed to supply a missing word. For example, “Sing. She was a great ____.” The correct
response being ‘singer’. Other studies have supported the use of such sentence contexts [21,22]
and word analogieswith children[23], inorder to elicit production [24].Performance on such
morpho-semantic based tasks is likely to tap into the children’s lexical networks, sentence
processing abilities, and the syntactic and semantic knowledge of the root and suffix. Studies
have revealed that vocabulary are learnt through frequent exposure in reading materials [25,26],
indicating that morphological analysis is important for the development of vocabulary [27,28],
spelling [11,28–31], and reading [11,32] in school-age children.
The acquisition of complex morphological words is a late linguistic achievement which is linked
to the development of literate language [33], with the most rapid growth occurring between the
fourth and eighth grade [19,34,35]. Windsor conveyed that children’s use of their knowledge of
derivational morphology inorder to increase their written and spoken vocabularies becomes a
crucial issue in language development [36]. This knowledge of word structure expands rapidly
during the middle elementary grades during which children can read fluently, gaining skills in
examining words to determine the meaning. This learning process includes a metalinguistic
strategy that children continue to use into their adult years to learn several novel words [37].
Studies have time and again indicated that the ability to analyze and use derivatives,increases
with grade level which follows an expected pattern, though the rate at which the student’s
progress through the sequence differs considerably between children. Children between the first
and sixth grades become more skillful in understanding words with suffixes, making new words
with suffixes and isolating suffixes [20,38,39], as they continue progressing in these skills
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through high school [40]. A sharp growth in the morphological skills during the upper
elementary grades (between the fourth and sixth grades) has been reported [41]. Studies have
stated that the growth of derivatives does increase three times compared to the growth of root
words among children [42]. A partial use of the highly productive instrumental and agentive -er
(e.g., ‘cooker’ and ‘preacher’ respectively) occurs by 7 or 8 years of age [43]. Whereas, the less
productive agentive suffixes -ist (e.g., ‘cyclist’) and -ian (e.g., ‘magician’) appear by 4 years of
age, and are used seldom when compared to the agentive -er [44]. According to Derwing, the
adverbial suffix, -ly, and an adjectival suffix, -y, appear slightly later than agentive suffixes. The
relational knowledge of the diminutive suffix -ie (‘doggie’) is acquired much later, although it
may serve as a nickname rather than a diminutive function [43]. Anglin revealed a significant
growth in vocabulary knowledge during the early and middle elementary school years, with
improvement in the comprehension of derived words across grades 1 and 5 [45]. Multi-
morphemic words (three or more morphemes) were also observed to develop better in children of
fifth grade than the first grade. Carlisle reported that the fifth graders performed superiorly when
compared to the third graders on all the tasks [20].Using a derived word production task,
Jarmulowicz found children between the first and third grades exhibited improvement (30% to
approximately 75%) in stress production on derived words with non-neutral suffixes [46];
whereas the children’s placement of primary stress with neutral suffixes on derived words
reached the ceiling level, right from the lowest grade. Nippold and Sun studied 46 younger
children (10 year olds) and 48 older adolescents (13 year olds) in the use of derived nominal and
derived adjectives and found that the performance of the latter group was better than the former
in both types of word derivations [47].Karuppali and Bhat proclaim that although the linguistic
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development is pronounced in the early school years, the language development in
morphological aspects is found to continue into adolescence as well [48].
Though the importance of morphological awareness for literacy skills has been well documented
[33], this area of linguistic awareness has attained limited interest when compared to
phonological awareness [49].The significance of timely detection of language delays and
disorders in young children are well known, but not in the case of older children and adolescents.
Individuals with linguistic deficits may have to face repeated failures and hence are always under
social pressure. These individuals may also have a high dropout rate resulting in a low self-
esteem. Because of the problems in finding suitable tasks to evaluate the linguistic deficits in
these individuals [50], either over or under identification is a common scenario. Though there are
a handful of tests [51–54] that target morphological processing, there are none that assesses the
morphological system in older children and adolescents in India, posing a challenge in the
identification of individuals with language disorders. However, research on morphological
analysis in Indian languages revolve primarily on the development of linguistic based computer
programs in Marathi [55], Hindi [56], Bishnupriya Manipuri, Tamil [57], Gujarati [58],
Malayalam [57], and Kannada [57]. The use of existing language tests that are developed in the
west [51–54], have resulted in major limitations when considered to be used in India which is a
multilingual and multicultural country. Indian researchers [59], did study the degree of
satisfaction of Indian Speech Language Pathologists (SLP) with the use of the available
standardized language tests, and found 75% of the SLPs feeling dissatisfied with the existing
language tests. Kumar, Rout, and Kundu [59] expressed the need to develop and upgrade formal
language tests based on linguistic variations (dialects), socio-economic status and age. Hence,
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the present study attempts to develop morphological task using a derivational suffix method to
assess language abilities in Indian adolescents.
Method
The present study followed a two-stage cluster random sampling design. The research protocol
was approved by Institutional Ethical Committee of Kasturba Medical College, Manipal
Academy of Higher Education, Mangalore. The study was conducted between January 2016 to
June 2016.
Participants
The Registrar General and Census Commissioner of the Government of India in 1991 did reveal
the adolescent age group (10 – 19 years) to comprise of one-fifth of India’s population. The
current study included typically developing school going adolescents having a lower and upper
age limit of 10 and 15.11 years respectively. For the current study of interest, the Block
Education Office of Mangalore was approached, and five potential English medium schools
following the State Board syllabus were selected using simple random sampling. Following this,
children were recruited using a checklist which was provided to the school teachers. Participants
who fit the age criteria were included in the study. The exclusion criteria included children with
a complaint/history of any speech and/or language problems, cognitive issues, reading/writing
issues, acquired hearing loss, academic failures, any transfer from more than one school, or any
shift in medium of instruction. Participants who met the inclusion and exclusion criteria were
identified and subjected to randomization (via random number assignment) for the pilot study
and the final field testing. An informed consent form was obtained from the selected participants
before the commencement of the study.The sample size was estimated based on the prevalence
of adolescents between 10-19 years of age in India (Census of India, 2001); and was calculated
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using the formula n = N/1 + N(e)2[n=sample size, N=population size, e=level of precision at
0.05]. The distribution of participants based on their age for the pilot study and final field testing
are portrayed in Table 1.
Table 1
Distribution of participants for the pilot study and final field testing across age.
Groups Age range (years) Number of participants Pilot
study Final field
testing I >10 – ≤10.11 15 72 II >11 – ≤11.11 15 72 III >12 – ≤12.11 15 72 IV >13 – ≤13.11 15 72 V >14 – ≤14.11 15 72 VI >15 – ≤15.11 15 72
Procedure
The development of the derivational suffix task followed 3 stages. Stage I involved task
construction along with pilot study; Stage II included the task administration; while Stage III
focused on establishing test reliability and validity measures.
Stage one began with the construction of the items for this task, which were age specific, with
the vocabulary fitting within the core curriculum of the participants from 4th to 10th standard. The
curriculum content of each of the standards differed across disciplines - Mathematics
(Geometry/Algebra), English Literature, Sciences (Biology/Physics/Chemistry), Environmental
Sciences, and Social Sciences. Each of the textbooks across the standards were scrutinized for
suitable free and bound morphemes (abstract and concrete words) which were further extracted
and allocated specifically under each group. The presentation method followed a single word and
a sentence format, wherein the prepared items were assigned for two modalities of presentation
(visual and auditory). Initially, out of the formulated 63 auditory items (root words), 44 were
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verbs, 13 were adjectives, and 6 were nouns; whereas out of the 62 visual items (root words), 40
were verbs, 16 were adjectives, and 6 were nouns. Four speech language pathologists and the
respective English teachers of the six standards examined the validity of the task and its items.
Essential modifications pertaining to maintaining uniformity of the word classes of the root
words and its derived forms were made. Items which had root word- derived form combinations,
which were not following the desired ones (derived nominal and derived adjectives) were
eliminated, such as adjective-adverb combinations (e.g., certain - certainly). Separate sets of
stimuli were prepared for each of the six groups (Group I - VI). Five test items were retained
under the task for each group, specific to each modality, resulting in a total of 60 items (5 items x
6 groups x 2 modalities). For the final auditory and visual root words, 38 (19 + 19) were verbs,
12 (6 + 6) were adjectives, and 10 (5 + 5) were nouns. Both the auditory and visual derived
forms consisted of 54 (26 + 26) derived nominals and 8 (4 + 4) derived adjectives each. The task
was designed to include items that followed a constructed response format along with suitable
instructions. Examples of the items for the auditory and visual task are mentioned in Table 2.
Table 2
Examples of the test items that were used in the study for both modalities.
Root word
Question Expected reponse
Aud
itor
y m
odal
ity 1. Confident Sunil just learnt how to ride a bicycle by himself. He
never had the ______ Confidence
2. Corrode Some metals react to sunlight and water. This reaction can cause _________
Corrosion
Vis
ual
mod
alit
y
1. Brutal The investigators immediately arrived at the crime scene. They were shocked by the _____
Brutality
2. Achieve Sanjay won the state chess competition. It was a very big _____
Achievement
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A standard biserial scoring system was followed, wherein a correct response was assigned a
score of 1, while an unattempted/incorrect response received a score of 0. Caution was taken to
avoid inter-related and inter-locked items.
The participants [N = 90 students (n = 15 per group)] of each age group received three sets of
stimuli – easy, medium, and difficult levels. The easy set included items which were a level
below the target age group; the medium set had items which was at the level of the same target
age group; while the difficult set had items which was above the target age group. For example,
Group II (11-11.111 year-olds) received stimuli which was of Group I [10-10.11 year-olds (easy
set)], its same target age group [11-11.11 year-olds (medium set)], and of Group III [12-12.11
year-olds (difficult set)]. A similar testing pattern was followed for groups which could receive
all three sets of difficulty levels, except for Group I and VI which did not receive an easy set and
difficult set respectively. A item difficulty index was obtained based on the responses by the
participants of the respective groups.A stringent item difficulty index range of 40-70%
(intermediate level of difficulty) was considered for the inclusion of the items. This was done so
as to prevent any floor or ceiling effect of the chosen stimuli. The good items were determined
considering items that received a discriminating power >0.3, which according to Hammill,
Brown, Larsen, and Wiederholt is satisfactory [60].Items which attained a discrimination power
of <0.3 were discarded. A Cronbach’s alpha value of >0.70 was considered; wherein items
receiving a value of <0.70 were discarded [61].
Stage two began with the recruitment of participants for the final field testing. For the visual
modality of the task, a paper containing the instructions and the target items was given to each
examinee; whereas for its auditory counterpart, the items with its instructions were verbally
presented. The examiner who was a post-graduate with 5 years of experience working in the field
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of Speech Language Pathology noted the verbal responses that were generated by the examinee
for both modalities. A single stimuli set targeting its age equivalent group was administered. The
field testing was carried out over a period of 3 months. The auditory modality based section was
followed by the visual modality. Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilk Test was performed to
ascertain the normality distribution and was found to be significant. Descriptive statistics was
done to analyze the scores that were obtained under the task under every group across the
modalities.
Stage three consisted of the evaluation of the content validity (discrimination power and
difficulty index) of the task, which was mostly done during the task construction phase itself. In
order to attain a good construct validity, the typically developing adolescents were compared
with 60 age matched adolescents with language disorders (10 adolescents with language disorder
X 6 groups) using Z test (to compare their responses to items) and Mann Whitney Test (to
compare the total scores in the task). These adolescents with language disorders were identified
by the school teachers using the checklist, as well as adolescents who demonstrated a relatively
poor semantic score in the Linguistic Profile Test [19]. The cut-off scores, sensitivity, specificity,
and area under the curve was determined using Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC)
analysis. To establish a good test reliability, Cronbach’s alpha value was determined during the
test construction phase itself. The task was re-administered on 10% of the total sample size (n =
7 participants from each group), after 2 weeks of the initial administration, as part of the test-
retest reliability measure. Kappa statistics (agreement between each item in the task) and Intra-
class correlation coefficient (agreement between total scores of the task) was done to determine
the coefficient of reliability.
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Results
The current study focused upon the development of a derivational suffixtask (auditory and
visual) for adolescents >10 - ≤ 15.11 years. The below mentioned results are of the test items
used for the final field testing. The data was then entered in SPSS version 16 and subjected to
statistical analysis. Descriptive statistics was performed to measure the mean and SD of the
scores of the task of the typically developing adolescents and age matched adolescents with
language disorders under each group. Table 3 shows the mean and SD of the scores of the
derivational suffix task of the typically developing and age matched adolescents with language
disorders spectively.
Table 3
The Mean and SD of the scores of the derivational suffix task (auditory and visual) of the
typically developing adolescents and adolescents with language disorders.
Auditory modality Typically developing
adolescents Adolescents with
language disorders Group Mean S.D Mean S.D Group I 3.05 1.53 0.60 0.84 Group II 3.26 1.47 0.20 0.42 Group III 3.44 1.50 1.60 1.26 Group IV 3.38 1.56 1.40 1.07 Group V 3.33 1.47 1.80 1.03 Group VI 3.22 1.43 1.30 1.34 Visual modality Typically developing
adolescents Adolescents with
language disorders Group Mean S.D Mean S.D Group I 2.71 2.30 0.80 0.79 Group II 3.31 1.73 0.20 0.42 Group III 2.99 1.21 1.20 0.79 Group IV 3.47 1.62 1.60 1.43 Group V 3.60 1.50 1.20 1.23 Group VI 3.76 1.72 1.30 1.42
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The test-retest reliability of the items which was measured using Kappa statistics revealed that all
items of the task (auditory and visual) of each group attained a Kappa value of 1.0 with a level of
significance at p<0.001. The results of the Intra-class correlation coefficient reveals Group I to
have attained 0.94 and 1.0; Group II attained 1.0 and 1.0; Group III attained 1.0 and 0.81; Group
IV attained 1.0 and 0.98; Group V attained 0.86 and 1.0; and Group VI attained 1.0 and 1.0 for
auditory and visual modalities respectively at p<0.05. ROC analysis was performed to determine
the sensitivity and specificity of the task (auditory and visual). Table 4 shows the details about
the cut off score, sensitivity, specificity, area under the curve and the level of significance at
p<0.05 of the task.It was observed the auditory and visual item sets (Group I - VI) received a
good level of significance (p<0.05).
Table 4
The ROC values of the derivational suffix task (Auditory and Visual)
Group Cut-off
score
Sensitivity
(%)
Specificity
(%)
Area under
the curve
p-value
Group I-A ≥ 2 82 80 0.90 0.000
Group I-V ≥ 2 56 80 0.68 0.048
Group II-A ≥ 1 95 80 0.95 0.000
Group II-V ≥ 1 88 80 0.92 0.000
Group III-A ≥ 2 88 80 0.80 0.002
Group III-V ≥ 2 88 60 0.87 0.000
Group IV-A ≥ 2 83 60 0.83 0.001
Group IV-V ≥ 2 82 60 0.80 0.002
Group V-A ≥ 2 85 60 0.79 0.003
Group V-V ≥ 3 89 60 0.87 0.000
Group VI-A ≥ 2 85 70 0.81 0.001
Group VI-V ≥ 3 80 80 0.85 0.000
Note. A indicates an Auditory item, and V indicates a Visual item. Significance at p<0.05
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Mann Whitney Test was done for the items of the task (auditory and visual) of each group,
inorder to compare the responses of the typically developing and age matched adolescents with
language disorder. Table 5 shows the Z values and the level of significance at p<0.05 of the
items of the task (auditory and visual) of each group. Further, Mann Whitney Test was done to
compare the total scores of the typically developing and age matched adolescents with language
disorders on the task (auditory and visual) of each group. Group I attained a Z value of 4.159
(p<0.001) and 2.002 (p<0.05); Group II attained 4.766 (p<0.001) and 4.429 (p<0.001); Group III
attained 3.231 (p<0.001) and 3.976 (p<0.001); Group IV attained 3.491 (p<0.001) and 3.156
(p<0.05); Group V attained 3.106 (p<0.05) and 3.979 (p<0.001); and Group VI attained 3.379
(p<0.001) and 3.812 (p<0.001) for the auditory and visual modalities respectively.
Table 5
Z values and Level of Significance of the Items of derivational suffix task (Auditory & Visual)
Auditory modality Visual modality Item no. Z value p-value Item no. Z value p-value
Gro
up I
1 A 3.335 0.000 1 V 3.136 0.001 2 A 1.863 0.031 2 V 2.025 0.021 3 A 3.797 0.000 3 V 3.06 0.001 4 A 2.353 0.009 4 V 1.783 0.037 5 A 3.450 0.000 5 V 2.36 0.047
Gro
up I
I
6 A 3.986 0.000 6 V 4.097 0.000 7 A 4.520 0.000 7 V 4.197 0.000 8 A 4.520 0.000 8 V 4.407 0.000 9 A 2.809 0.002 9 V 1.752 0.04
10 A 2.847 0.002 10 V 4.633 0.000
Gro
up I
II 11 A 3.598 0.045 11 V 4.336 0.000
12 A 4.769 0.000 12 V 2.770 0.041 13 A 2.834 0.022 13 V 2.164 0.012 14 A 1.923 0.027 14 V 2.861 0.002 15 A 3.673 0.000 15 V 2.116 0.017
Gro
up I
V 16 A 3.253 0.001 16 V 2.784 0.003 17 A 2.590 0.028 17 V 2.691 0.004 18 A 3.283 0.001 18 V 2.112 0.033 19 A 3.148 0.001 19 V 1.678 0.047 20 A 2.032 0.021 20 V 3.406 0.000
80
Gro
up V
21 A 2.304 0.030 21 V 1.875 0.03 22 A 2.715 0.003 22 V 3.323 0.000 23 A 3.592 0.000 23 V 2.636 0.004 24 A 2.116 0.017 24 V 4.083 0.000 25 A 1.933 0.027 25 V 3.558 0.000
Gro
up V
I 26 A 2.973 0.001 26 V 2.777 0.003 27 A 2.179 0.015 27 V 4.505 0.000 28 A 2.738 0.003 28 V 3.424 0.000 29 A 3.853 0.000 29 V 3.38 0.000 30 A 2.182 0.028 30 V 1.745 0.041
Note. A indicates an Auditory item, and V indicates a Visual item. The level of significance is maintained at p<0.05 level
Discussion
The current study focused upon the development of derivational suffix task (auditory and visual)
for adolescents > 10 – ≤ 15.11 years. The results were analyzed to obtain test reliability and
validity of the language task. This task (auditory and visual) received a high test-retest reliability,
with all the items of the auditory and visual modalities receiving a Kappa value of 1.0 at
p<0.001. A high intra-class correlation coefficient (>0.81) was attained at p<0.05 for both the
modalities. This high reliability attained by the task implied that morphological derivations can
be considered as a measure to evaluate the morphological skills of an adolescent. The test items
of the present task (auditory and visual) were taken from the academic textbooks [62] aimed to
assess the individual’s ability to use derived nominals and derived adjectives, which commonly
occur in school-based textbooks [3,4,63,64]. This derivational suffix task consisted of items
which were presented in both spoken and printed words, which was in line with the study done
by Rastle, Davis, and New[65]. This task which involved the production of word derivations, is
in contrast to the judgement task (morpho-phonemic structures) present in the original and
extended versions of the Linguistic Profile Test [18,19]. The derivational suffix task is a less
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conscious and implicit processing of the morphological information [66], which is considered as
a higher-order ability [2].
The test items of the derivational suffixtask consisted of bound morphemes which varied with
age. The 10-10.11 year olds exhibited bound morphemes (suffixes) which were ‘-ion’, ‘-ful’, ‘-
ment’, ‘-ation’, and ‘-tion’; the 11-11.11 year olds used‘-ce’, ‘-ance’,and‘-age’; the 12-12.11
year olds used‘-or’, ‘-ative’, ‘-cy’, and ‘-al’; the 13-13.11 year olds used‘-ize’, ‘-ship’, ‘-city’, ‘-
ity’, and ‘-ve’; the 14-14.11 year olds used‘-sion’, ‘-itive’, and ‘-ism’; while the 15-15.11 year
olds used‘-us’, ‘-cy’and‘–ce’. A similar pattern of age-wise variation in using suffixes in words
was observed in the study done by Nippold and Sun [47]. Researchers have recommended that
the acquisition of these complex morphological words is a late linguistic achievement which is
linked to the development of literate language [11], with the most rapid growth occurring
between the fourth and eighth grade [19,40,41]. Windsor conveyed that children’s use of their
knowledge of derivational morphology in order to increase their written and spoken vocabularies
becomes a crucial issue in language development[67]. Similarly, Anglin revealed a significant
growth in vocabulary knowledge during the early and middle elementary school years, with
improvement in the comprehension of derived words observed across grades 1 and 5 [45].
Morpho-phonological derivations are reported to improve during elementary school years with
improvement in accuracy of responses [46].
The derivational suffix task received a good validity based on the Mann Whitney Test, with all
the items of the auditory and visual modalities receiving a validity at p<0.05. This implied that
this task can be considered as a measure to identify adolescents with a language disorder. The
ROC analysis done for the derivational suffix task revealed all groups to have attained a
sensitivity of 80% and above, except for Group I-V which attained a sensitivity between 60–
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80%. The specificity of the task revealed all groups to have attained a specificity of 80% and
above, except for Group III-V, Group IV-A, Group IV-V, Group V-A, Group V-V, and Group
VI-A which attained a specificity between 60–80%. This task which followed a constructed
response format received cut-off scores within the range of ≥1-≥3, with a maximum score of 5
for each group. The incorrect responses which were generated by the adolescents with language
disorders comprised of existent and non-existent bound morphemes (suffixes). The 10-10.11
year old adolescents with language disorder generated bound morphemes such as ‘-ed’ and ‘–
ing’; the 11-11.11 year olds used ‘-ment’, ‘-tion’, ‘-ion’, ‘-s’, and ‘-ston’; the 12-12.11 year olds
used ‘-dation’, ‘-zation’, and ‘-er’; the 13-13.11 year olds used ‘-ance’, ‘-able’, ‘-fy’, ‘-y’, ‘-
tation’, and ‘-ge’; the 14-14.11 year olds used ‘-cs’, ‘-ism’, ‘-nation’, ‘-tational’, ‘-lational’, ‘-
ness’, ‘-ly’, and ‘-ation’; while the 15-15.11 year olds used ‘-ful’, ‘-ble’, ‘-ers’, ‘-es’, ‘-t’, ‘-ence’,
‘-al’, ‘-cers’, and ‘-tionously’.
The morphemic errors exhibited by the adolescents with language disorder were mostly
substitutions (e.g., ‘nourishing’ for the permissible response ‘nourishment’), and additions (e.g.,
‘circulational’ for the permissible response ‘circulation’). These errors were in accordance to the
study done by Rubin et al. who found similar error patterns in children with language learning
disabilities [68]. Certain responses also consisted of the generation of the root word itself, and
also addition of a prefix instead of a suffix (e.g., ‘unargue’ for the permissible response
‘argument’). Though the generated suffixes were incorrect, an increase in the number of suffixes
was observed with age.
Performance on morpho-semantic based tasks is likely to tap into the children’s lexical networks,
sentence processing abilities, and the syntactic and semantic knowledge of the root and suffix.
The adolescents with language disorder in the present study were found to be less sensitive to
83
morphological aspects which are conveyed by derivational morphemes than typically developing
children. Similar findings are reported in children with reading and/or language deficits
[30,34,69]. The incorrect responses generated can be attributed to the poor understanding of
grammatical structures, a weak working memory, and/or a poor morphological awareness which
may lead to difficulties in recalling and applying spelling and syntactic rules and breaking-down
spoken language. According to Casalis et al. the production of derived words are found to be
predominantly challenging for children with language or reading difficulties [70]. Kieffer
suggested that the skills exhibited in morphological analysis can be used to differentiate skilled
readers from students with reading difficulties [71]. Morphological awareness may offer a
compensatory path of training poor readers and children with dyslexia, and may also be the
means by which certain adolescents overcome dyslexia[66]. Other studies have identified poor
readers in middle and high school as well as in college to have a poor grasp over derivational
suffixes [40].
Conclusion
The developed derivational suffix task (auditory and visual) is a norm-referenced and a criterion
referenced task which can be used in clinical settings to gain insight about the morphological
problems encountered by adolescents with language disorders. It would be of great interest for
future studies to explore other methods to determine the morphological pattern of the
adolescents. There is scope to develop regional based norms and to extend the adolescent age
range to 19 years of age. The present study paves way for prospective research to assess the
pattern of language development in adolescents with specific language disorders as well.
Acknowledgment
84
We are grateful and thank the school authority for their cooperation to conduct our study and
making it a good success. We thank the Dean, Kasturba Medical College, Mangalore, Manipal
Academy of Higher Education, for supporting us to conduct such a study.
Conflict of interest: None declared.
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Jayashree S. Bhat, Professor and Sudhin Karuppali, Associate Professor, Dept of Audiology
& Speech Language Pathology, Kasturba Medical College, Manipal Academy of Higher
Education, Mangalore.
