Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 2000, 41, 287 296

The role of derivational morphology in vocabulary acquisition:

Get by with a little help from my morpheme friends
RAYMOND BERTRAM 1, MATTI LAINE 2 and MINNA MARIA VIRKKALA 3
1

Department of Psychology, University of Turku, Finland

Department of Neurology, University of Turku, Finland
3
Department of Education, University of Turku, Finland
2

Bertram, R., Laine, M. & Virkkala, M. M. (2000). The role of derivational morphology in vocabulary acquisition: Get by with a little help
from my morpheme friends. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 41, 287296.
This study explores the role of morphology in vocabulary knowledge of 3 rd and 6 th grade Finnish elementary school children. In a word
definition task, children from both grades performed overall better on derived words than on monomorphemic words. However, the results
were modified by the factors Frequency and Productivity. Most strikingly, performance on monomorphemic words was disproportionately
weaker than on derived words at the low frequency range. At the high-frequency range, derived words with low-productive suffixes yielded
poorest performance. We partly make an appeal to the lexical-statistical properties of the Finnish language to explain the interaction of
Frequency and Word Structure. At any rate, the results suggest that Finnish elementary school children benefit significantly from utilizing
morphology in determining word meanings.
Key words: Morphology, acquisition, Finnish, lexicon, productivity, frequency.
Raymond Bertram, Department of Psychology, University of Turku, FIN-20520 Turku, Finland. E-mail: rayber@utu.fi

Elementary school children encounter a huge number of

words that they have never seen before. Nagy and Anderson
(1984) estimate on the basis of the American Heritage Word
Frequency Book (WFB) of Carroll, Davies, and Richman
(1971) that in a corpus of printed school English in the US
from grades three through nine, more than 600, 000
orthographically distinct word types are present. The greater
part of these word types is of very low frequency. As a
matter of fact, about 585, 000 word types would occur no
more than 1 time per million. Somehow children have to
make sense of these low frequency words they are
confronted with during their elementary school years. After
all, they are supposed to extract a general understanding of
the texts they are exposed to. How would children get
around the problem that many of these texts contain a large
amount of low frequency words that are most probably
neologisms to them?
The most straightforward way to deal with this challenge
is seemingly to take up a dictionary and read the definition
and other lexical information related to the lexical entry.
This strategy, however, would be highly disrupting when
one is reading texts with a large number of unfamiliar
words. Moreover, recent studies (e.g., Scott & Nagy, 1997)
show that elementary school children frequently misunderstand dictionary definitions and that they fail to use
adequately the information dictionary definitions provide
them with.
An alternative strategy would be to make use of the
context to determine the meaning of an unfamiliar word
form. Several studies indicate that this strategy can indeed
be beneficial (Graves, 1986; Nagy & Herman, 1987; Wysocki

& Jenkins, 1987). Nevertheless, the context does not always

give sufficient clues to determine the meaning of an
unfamiliar word. Wysocki and Jenkins (1987) found that
children's success in deriving the meaning of unfamiliar
words was very much dependent on the strength of the
surrounding sentence context. Fairly often the context is
rather neutral and does not hint at the meaning of an
unfamiliar word. In addition, the more unfamiliar word
forms occur in a text, the less clues the context will provide
the readers with and the more difficult it will be to determine
the meaning of a particular unfamiliar word form.
A more successful way to determine the meaning of many
unfamiliar words could be to make use of a word's
morphological structure, since most of the low frequency
words consist of two or more morphemes (Nagy &
Anderson, 1984; see also Baayen, 1994, who calculated that
in the Dutch INL corpus of 42 million words there are
13,360 word formations occurring only once, and 96% of
them are morphologically complex). The ability to recognize
the morphemic structure in complex words and the ability to
arrive at the meaning by means of the more familiar
components seems therefore very useful. Indeed, there is
ample evidence that children use word elements in learning
unfamiliar words (e.g., Anglin, 1993; Freyd & Baron, 1982;
Shu & Anderson, 1997; Tyler & Nagy, 1989; Van DaalenKapteijns & Elshout-Mohr, 1981). In a detailed study,
Anglin (1993) shows that a great deal of the vocabulary
growth of elementary school children can be accounted for
by an increasing ability to deal with morphologically
complex words. Moreover, his study clearly points out that
many morphologically complex words are not listed in the

# 2000 The Scandinavian Psychological Associations. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. ISSN 0036-5564.

288

R. Bertram, M. Laine and M. M. Virkkala

mental lexicon, but that children from the 1 st, 3 rd and 5 th

grade arrive at their meaning via the morphological substructure of the words. Freyd and Baron (1982) found that
fast vocabulary development is enhanced by morphological
awareness. In their study, superior 5 th grade elementary
school children (mean age 10 : 9 years) outperformed
average 8 th graders on a standard vocabulary test including
30 monomorphemic words and 30 derived words. The 5 th
graders outperformed the 8 th graders on both word types,
but the difference between grades was greater for the derived
words than for the simple words. This difference was based
on the greater ability of the superior 5 th graders to analyze
words into morphemes, more specifically, to detect the root
in the derived word forms and to give definitions on the
basis of the root.
All in all, the general observation is that morphology has
a role to play in vocabulary acquisition. The more specific
question in this study is whether the effect of morphological
structure interacts with factors such as frequency and affixal
productivity (see Baayen, 1994, for a way of measuring the
degree of productivity of a given affix) that have been shown
to affect lexical processing of adults (Bertram, Laine, &
Karvinen, 1999; Bertram, Schreuder, & Baayen, 2000b;
Stemberger & MacWhinney, 1986). With respect to frequency, some models like the Morphological Race Model of
Frauenfelder and Schreuder (1992) or the AAM model of
Caramazza and his colleagues (Burani & Caramazza, 1987;
Caramazza, Laudanna, & Romani, 1988) assume that
morpheme-based processing is much more likely to take
place for low frequency complex words than for complex
words of higher frequency. The idea is that it would
necessarily take a certain number of exposures for complex
words to develop full-form representations via which lexical
processing could take place. Bertram et al. (2000b) stress
that the balance of storage and computation hinges upon the
interaction of specific factors of the affixes involved. In too
many studies a pot-pourri of affixes is selected to represent a
certain category (for instance, derivations or inflections)
without taking into consideration affix-specific properties. 1
Another new aspect of the present study is the language
involved. While most vocabulary acquisition studies have
been conducted in English with English natives (but see e.g.,
Shu & Anderson, 1997 and Shu, Anderson, & Zhang, 1995,
for some exceptions), this study explores a language very
deviant from any Indo-European language, namely Finnish.
Finnish is a Finno-Ugric, agglutinative language with a very
rich morphology. It has been estimated that nominal
inflection in Finnish yields over 2000 possible word forms
(Karlsson & Koskenniemi, 1985). Nouns may be marked for
number, case (13 cases in active use), and possession. In
addition, clitic particles conveying pragmatic information
may be attached to the end of a word. Moreover, derivation
and compounding is very productive in Finnish, leading to
huge morphological families. 2 Of the 1, 022, 944 distinct
noun types in our database, 3 only 26, 355 (2.6%) is
# 2000 The Scandinavian Psychological Associations.

Scand J Psychol 41 (2000)

accounted for by monomorphemic nominative singulars. 4

Interestingly, hapaxes, word formations that appear only
once in our corpus, surface relatively more in the
polymorphemic (N 613, 572, 60.7%) than in the monomorphemic group (33.6%). To summarize, the bulk of
Finnish words in running text is polymorphemic (for nouns,
97.4%) and of very low frequency. Consequently, Finnish
language users will have to resort to morphological parsing
quite frequently. This leads us to speculate that the role of
morphology in this language could be visible in domains
where one would not easily expect it, for instance at the
high-frequency range.
In this study, we will employ a vocabulary (word
definition) test to examine the performance of native Finnish
3 rd and 6 th graders on monomorphemic and derived words,
presented in a random order, while controlling for
psycholinguistically relevant factors such as word length
(in letters), surface frequency (the number of times the word
proper occurs in our corpus), lemma frequency (the number
of times the word proper plus all the inflectional variants of
the stem occur in our corpus) and average bigram frequency
(the average of the number of times that all combinations of
two subsequent letters in a word occur in our corpus).
Moreover, we will systematically investigate the role that
frequency and affix productivity might play on children's
word knowledge.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
This study investigates how morphological knowledge
contributes to Finnish children's understanding of words.
More specifically, the question is what children would know
about a morphologically complex word form such as
juusto la ``cheese location marker ) ``cheesery'' in
comparison to a matched monomorphemic control word
veitikka ``rascal''. Understanding is measured by oral
definitions given by children to the probe words. Thus the
general question addressed in this study is whether children
significantly benefit from morphological structure in determining the meaning of derived words. By varying the factors
Frequency and Productivity, we will investigate whether and
how performance differs for high frequency versus low
frequency words and for derived words with high versus low
productive suffixes. We selected a group of 3 rd grade
children and a group of 6 th grade children to assess these
questions at different developmental stages.
To assess the potential effect of word frequency on
vocabulary knowledge of elementary school children, a
group of words of relatively high frequency (about 35 per
million) and a group of words of relatively low frequency
(about 1 per million) were selected. Frequency effects are
found in all kinds of lexical tasks with various subject
populations (e.g., Baayen, Dijkstra & Schreuder, 1997;
Laine, Niemi, Koivuselka-Sallinen & Hyona, 1995; Stemberger & MacWhinney, 1986), generally showing that high

Morphology in vocabulary acquisition

Scand J Psychol 41 (2000)

289

frequency words are dealt with more effectively than low

frequency words. Accordingly, we expect that also our
sample of school children will show better performance for
the high frequency than for the low frequency words. Of
particular interest is the possible interaction between
frequency and morphological structure, that is, whether
children benefit from their morphological knowledge to the
same extent in the high and the low frequency range. As
suggested by several authors (e.g., Schreuder & Baayen,
1995; Stemberger & MacWhinney, 1986), whole-word
representations play a much more important role in the
access of complex words in the higher frequency range. The
role of morphology might therefore be more visible at the
low frequency range than at the high frequency range. On
the other hand, the overall morphological productivity of
the Finnish language could entail that effects of morphology
are visible even at the high frequency range.
To assess the potential effect of suffix productivity, a
group of derived words with a relatively high-productive
suffix 5 (henceforth, high-productive derivations) and a
group of derived words with a relatively low-productive
suffix (henceforth, low-productive derivations) were selected
and presented to the children. Bertram et al. (1999; 2000b)
suggest that high productivity triggers rule-based processing
behaviour. In other words, the more productive a suffix is,
the more likely it is that morphological structure affects
performance. In Experiment 1, the vocabulary test was
administered to the 3 rd graders and in Experiment 2 to the
6 th graders.

suffix only. For instance, for the word sika la

``pig'' location marker ) ``piggery'', a definition like ``a
place where you can buy computers'' will be given 0 points;
a definition like ``it smells there, there are pigs'' will be given
1 point; a definition like ``a place where they breed pigs'' will
be given full credit, that is, 2 points. When the stem was
stripped off and appeared in another morphologically
simple or complex word formation (e.g., an answer like
sikaa ``pig'' partitive on the presentation of sikala), the
answer was rewarded with 1 point. This purely formal
morphological analysis did not occur very often though (on
4.0% of the items in the 3 rd grade and 1.8% in the 6 th
grade).

THE SCORING SYSTEM

Participants. Thirty-two elementary school children from two 3 rd

grade classes (on the average 9 : 6 years of age) of the Puolala School
in Turku (Finland) were tested individually in a quiet room. All of
them were native speakers of Finnish.

Two of the authors (MMV & ML), being native speakers of

Finnish, rated all the definitions of six of the 3 rd and 6 th
grade children independently. Additional scoring was
included to assess suffix knowledge in greater detail. The
ratings of the judges were highly correlated (for each
condition, r > 0.90), after which one of them (MMV) rated
the rest of the material. All of the average scores presented
here are based on her ratings.
Scoring on the basis of the whole word form
The scoring system we employed was based on the meaning
and part of speech of the whole word form. For every target
word, a child obtained 2 points when the given definition
was fully correct, 1 point when the definition was partly
correct, and 0 points when the definition was not correct at
all or when no answer was given. As a reference, the
definitions of a standard Finnish dictionary, the Nykysuomen sanakirja (1978), were employed. It should be noted
that for almost any derivation the meaning is greatly
determined by the stem. In practice this means that at least
one point was given when the children indicated knowledge
of the stem, but no points when they indicated to know the
# 2000 The Scandinavian Psychological Associations.

Scoring on the basis of the suffix for zero point responses

For all those instances where children's answers were rated
zero points, we conducted subsequent analyses to assess
their suffix knowledge in more detail. One point was given
for a suffix that was formally and=or semantically recognized in the response. In other words, in this suffix-related
scoring, the children got one point when they had said
juustola ``cheesery'' or ``a place where you can buy
computers'' upon the presentation of sikala ``piggery''.

EXPERIMENT 1
Method

Materials. Seventy target words were selected from our lexical

database accessed by the search program WordMill of Laine &
Virtanen (1999). Thirty-five of them were from the high-frequency
range and 35 from the low-frequency range. Within each frequency
range there were three different word types: derived words with a
high-productive suffix, derived words with a low-productive suffix
and monomorphemic words. In Table 1, the relevant quantitative
data of the 6 different conditions are presented; in addition, the
suffix functions are described and presented with an example.
Within each frequency range, conditions were matched for word
length in letters and for average lemma, surface and bigram
frequency. Moreover, the root frequency of the low- and highproductive derivations was matched at both frequency ranges. 6
Note that the root frequency should not have any effect if the
children's responses are based on the whole-word form. In other
words, when morphological analyses will not take place, the
response pattern for both types of derivation and the monomorphemic word forms should not differ. Finally, adding the derivational suffixes did not alter the root orthographically or
phonologically, neither in the low-productive nor in the highproductive condition. In other words, we deliberately selected our
derived target items so that no stem formation took place that could
have obscured the salience of the root. All the suffixes employed
conveyed both grammatical and lexical information.

290

Root
frequency

Lemma
frequency

Surface
frequency

Bigram
frequency

Word
length
in letters

Number
of items

Suffixes
employed

Function

Example

High-frequent derivation
with a high-productive suffix

314

32.8

6.4

1094

8.00

15

High-frequent derivation
with a low-productive suffix

181

33.9

8.4

1181

7.73

15

38.2

6.5

1120

7.20

-jA
-Us
-ntA
-stO
-mO
-lA
none

deverbal agent marker

deverbal abstract noun marker
deverbal causative marker
denominal collective noun marker
deverbal location marker
denominal location marker
-

laula ja ``singer''
ilmoit us ``announcement''
kerro nta ``narration''
laiva sto ``fleet''
kampaa mo ``hairdresser's''
kahvi la ``coffee bar''
kellari ``cellar''

-jA
-Us
-ntA
-stO
-mO
-lA
none

deverbal agent marker

deverbal abstract noun marker
deverbal causative marker
denominal collective noun marker
deverbal location marker
denominal location marker

somista ja ``decorator''
kuitta us ``receipt''
haudo nta ``bathing''
taru sto ``mythology''
sulatta mo ``meltery''
juusto la ``cheesery''
sikerma ``cluster''

Condition

High-frequent
monomorphemic word
Low-frequent derivation
with a high-productive suffix
Low-frequent derivation
with a low-productive suffix
Low-frequent
monomorphemic word

29.7

0.81

0.20

1359

8.27

15

28.5

1.00

0.23

1297

8.13

15

0.86

0.22

1163

7.20

R. Bertram, M. Laine and M. M. Virkkala

# 2000 The Scandinavian Psychological Associations.

Table 1 Quantitative data of the 6 target conditions in experiment 1, 3 rd grade

Scand J Psychol 41 (2000)

Morphology in vocabulary acquisition

Scand J Psychol 41 (2000)

Procedure. Each word was printed on a separate card and shown to
the participants. At the same time the word was spoken aloud by the
experimenter. The children were instructed to give an oral definition
of every single word presented. When they indicated that they did
not know a particular word, they were encouraged to guess.
Responses were tape-recorded and transcribed afterwards for
further analysis. The experiment lasted approximately 30 minutes
and was preceded by 10 practice words of variable morphological
structure and frequency.

RESULTS
Prior to statistical analysis we excluded two opaque items
from the low-frequent low-productive derivations, for
which according to three Finnish native speakers it
was impossible to calculate the meaning via the constituent
morphemes. All other items were included as they were
within two standard deviations of their condition mean.
Two children were discarded due to overall non-responsiveness.

Scoring on the basis of the whole word form

The responses on the remaining 68 definitions of the
remaining 30 children were used to calculate the mean
scores per condition (see Table 2).
A 2  3 repeated measures ANOVA revealed a significant
main effect for Frequency (F1(1, 29) 312, p < 0.001),
with high-frequent items being better defined than lowfrequent items, and for Morphological Structure
(F1(2, 58) 52.2, p < 0.001). Moreover, the interaction between these two factors was significant (F1(2, 58)
36.2, p < 0.001). As regards the main effect of Morphological Structure, post-hoc comparisons based on subsequent Ftests showed that the words with high-productive suffixes
were better defined than the words with low-productive
suffixes (F1(1, 29) 61.8, p < 0.001) or the monomorphemic
words (F1(1, 29) 79.8, p < 0.001). In addition, words with
low-productive suffixes elicited significantly higher scores
than monomorphemic words (F1(1, 29) 15.8, p < 0.001).
The observed interaction is mainly caused by the large
performance difference on the high vs. low-frequent monomorphemic words (a difference of 1.10 points), whereas
performance on both types of derived words drops down
less drastically when moving from the high- to the low-

frequency range (0.67 for high-productive and 0.49 for lowproductive derived words). Separate ANOVA's at the high
and low frequency range both showed a significant effect for
morphological structure (F1(2, 58) 42.2, p < 0.001 and
F1(2, 58) 44.2, p < 0.001, respectively). Post-hoc comparisons revealed that all contrasts differed significantly from
each other (all p's < 0.05). This means that at the highfrequency range high-productive derivations elicit the best
performance, followed by monomorphemic words and lowproductive derivations. At the low-frequency range, again
high-productive derivations yield best performance, followed by low-productive derivations and by monomorphemic words.
If we look at the distribution of 0-, 1-, and 2-point
definitions, it appears that the percentage of 0-point
definitions is higher for the monomorphemic words than
for the derived items (monomorphemic words 33.3%, lowproductive derivations 14.8%, high-productive derivations
16.1%). For the 2-point definitions, the proportion is
greater for high-productive derivations than for the other
two word types (monomorphemic words 48.3%, lowproductive derivations 46.3%, high-productive derivations
66.7%), yielding a highly significant effect (  2(4)
164.9, p < 0.001, with Yates' continuity correction).
Scoring on the basis of the suffix for zero point responses
For all the 130 instances where an attempt to define a
derived word yielded zero points, it was decided whether
suffix knowledge was present in the answer (either formally
or semantically). In 71.5% of all these instances (N 93),
this was indeed the case. Most interestingly, a chi-square
shows that suffix-related knowledge is not randomly
distributed over the high- and low-productive condition
(  2(1) 22.8, p < 0.001, with continuity correction). Suffix
knowledge was much more common on the high-productive
condition (60 out of 66) than success on the low-productive
condition (33 out of 64).
DISCUSSION OF EXPERIMENT 1
In line with previous research, this study shows a robust
frequency effect. Children's definitions of high-frequency
words were in ordinal scale nearly twice as good as

Table 2. Mean definition scores with SD of the 6 target conditions of the 3 rd graders in experiment 1
Morphological structure

Mean scores

Derivations with a high-productive suffix

Derivations with a low-productive suffix
Monomorphemic words

High-frequent words
1.84 (0.19)
1.54 (0.33)
1.70 (0.36)

Low-frequent words
1.17 (0.52)
1.05 (0.56)
0.60 (0.29)

Average
1.51
1.32
1.15

Average

1.69

0.94

1.33

# 2000 The Scandinavian Psychological Associations.

291

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R. Bertram, M. Laine and M. M. Virkkala

Scand J Psychol 41 (2000)

those of low-frequency words. As expected, 3 rd graders have

a better understanding of words that are used and=or
encountered regularly than words that are employed only
occasionally.
More interestingly, the morphological make-up of words
clearly affects our subjects'' performance in giving word
definitions. First of all, overall performance is poorest for
the category for which no fall-back on morphology is
possible, that is, the monomorphemic words, and best for
derived words in high-productive suffixes. The most
intriguing part of the data is the differential pattern that
we found at the high-frequency range in comparison with
the low-frequency range. In both frequency ranges, highproductive derivations elicit the best performance. However,
whereas monomorphemic words elicit good performance at
the high-frequency range, they caused considerable trouble
at the low-frequency range. In contrast, low-productive
derivations elicit relatively good performance at the lowfrequency range, but relatively poor at the high-frequency
range. How could we explain this diverse pattern of results?
We presume in accordance with previous research (e.g.,
Stemberger & MacWhinney, 1986) that full-form representations had little chance to develop at the low-frequency
range (in our case words with 1 or less occurences per
million). When no or only weak full-form representations
are available, little sense can be made for monomorphemic
words which do not contain sub-lexical units. However, for
derived words, sub-lexical units do exist in the form of
rather high-frequent morphemes, and calculating the meaning on the basis of these units provides a rather successful
back-up option, be it more successful for high- than for lowproductive derivations. At the high-frequency range, monomorphemic words have developed more stable representations via which children frequently retrieve the correct
semantics. The fact that both type of derivations differ from
monomorphemic words at this frequency range suggests to
us that morphological structure still has an impact here. For
low-productive derivations it is hindering performance, since
the low-productive suffixes are not yet so familiar and the
grammatical and semantic operations of the suffixes on the
word roots are not so well known. For the high-productive
derivations, performance is boosted, since the suffixes here
are more familiar, leading to a better understanding of the

grammatical and semantic operations of the suffixes on the

word roots. This notion is backed up by the chi-square
analysis of suffix knowledge on zero-scored words, where
high-productive suffixes elicit better performance than lowproductive ones.
It should be noted that the low-productive suffixes
employed here are rather transparent and it may well be
that the 6 th graders, being more advanced in their
vocabulary knowledge in general, and in their morphological awareness and knowledge in particular, will perform
better with the low-productive suffixes than the 3 rd graders.
By means of more or less the same vocabulary test for the
6 th graders of the same school, we tried to explore this
possibility, next to the other issues already raised in the
Introduction.

EXPERIMENT 2
METHOD
Participants Thirty-two elementary school children (on the average
12 : 6 years of age) from two 6 th grade classes of the Puolala School
in Turku, Finland, were tested individually in a quiet room on
location. All of them were native speakers of Finnish.
Materials Seventy target words were selected from our lexical
database, 35 representing the high-frequency range and 35 the lowfrequency range. The high-frequency words were exactly the same as
the ones employed for the 3 rd grade, but about 43% of the lowfrequency words were replaced in order to increase the degree of
difficulty. As in Experiment 1, both frequency conditions included
three different word types: derived words with a high-productive
suffix, derived words with a low-productive suffix and monomorphemic words. In Table 3, the relevant quantitative data of the three
conditions at the low-frequency range (the ones that differed from
Experiment 1) are presented. As in Experiment 1, word length in
letters, lemma frequency, surface frequency and bigram frequency
were controlled. The root frequency difference between the highproductive derivations (7.1) and the low-productive derivations
(18.9) almost reached significance (t2(28) 1.94, p2 0.06). We
discuss the implications for this root frequency bias after presentation of the results.

Procedure The procedure was identical to that of Experiment 1.

Table 3. Quantitative data of 3 target conditions in Experiment 2

Condition
Low-frequent derivation
with a high-productive suffix
Low-frequent derivation
with a low-productive suffix
Low-frequent
monomorphemic word

Lemma
frequency

Surface
frequency

Bigram
frequency

Word
length
in letters

Number
of items

Suffixes
employed

7.1

0.80

0.16

1100

7.80

15

18.9

0.52

0.15

1237

7.93

15

1.05

0.28

1361

8.20

-jA, -Us,
-ntA
-stO, -mO,
-lA
none

Root
frequency

# 2000 The Scandinavian Psychological Associations.

Example
kuitta us
``receipt''
taru sto
``mythology''
sikerma
``cluster''

Morphology in vocabulary acquisition

Scand J Psychol 41 (2000)

RESULTS
Prior to statistical analyses we excluded four opaque items
from the low-frequent low-productive derivations. All other
items were included as they were within two standard
deviations of their condition mean. All children were
included in the analyses as well.
Scoring on the basis of the whole word form
The responses of the remaining 66 definitions of the 32
children were used to calculate the mean scores per
condition. They are presented in Table 4.
A 2  3 repeated measures ANOVA revealed a significant
main effect for Frequency (F1(1, 31) 192.8, p < 0.001),
Morphological Structure (F1(2, 62) 23.6, p < 0.001), as well
as a significant interaction (F1(2, 62) 52.2, p < 0.001).
Again, the high-frequent items were better defined than the
low-frequent items. With respect to the main effect of
Morphological Structure, post-hoc comparisons showed that
the words with the high-productive suffixes were better
defined than the words with the low-productive suffixes
(F1(1, 29) 9.0, p < 0.001) or the monomorphemic words
(F1(1, 29) 36.7, p < 0.001). Moreover, the difference between words with low-productive suffixes and monomorphemic words was significant (F1(1, 29) 16.4, p < 0.001), the
former being defined more accurately than the latter. As in
Experiment 1, the significant interaction was accounted for
mainly by the large performance difference between the highvs. low-frequent monomorphemic words (a difference of 1.03
points), whereas performance on both types of derived words
drops down less drastically when moving from high- to lowfrequency range (0.69 for high-productive and 0.41 for lowproductive derived words). Separate ANOVA's at the high
and low frequency range both showed once again a significant
effect for morphological structure (F1(2, 62) 42.4, p < 0.001
and F1(2, 58) 37.1, p < 0.001, respectively). Post-hoc comparisons revealed that all contrasts but one significantly differ
from one another ( p's < 0.05). The only exception was the
contrast between high-productive derivations and the monomorphemic words at the high-frequency range ( p > 0.15).
This means that at the high-frequency range, high-productive
derivations and monomorphemic words elicit the best
performance, followed by low-productive derivations. At
the low-frequency range, the low-productive derivations yield

best performance, followed by the high-productive derivations and by the monomorphemic words.
If we look at the distribution of 0-, 1-, and 2-point
definitions, we see again that for monomorphemic items the
percentage of 0-point whole word definitions higher than for
the derived words (monomorphemic words 26.1%, lowproductive derivations 7.4%, high-productive derivations
14.4%). For the 2-point definitions, the proportion is
greater for high-productive derivations than for the other
two word types (monomorphemic words 65.4%, lowproductive derivations 64.6%, high-productive derivations
73.7%), yielding a highly significant difference
(  2(4) 148.0, p < 0.001, with Yates' continuity correction).
Scoring on the basis of the suffix for zero point responses
Of all the 122 instances where an attempt to define a derived
word yielded zero points, 75.4% (N 92) scored one point
for the suffix. In contrast with Experiment 1, a chi-square
test on the distribution of the correctly scored items shows
that they are randomly distributed over the high- and lowproductive condition (  2(1) 1.83, p > 0.1, with continuity
correction; for the high-productive condition the score was
55 out of 68, for the low-productive condition 37 out of 54).
DISCUSSION OF EXPERIMENT 2
The pattern of results found for the 6 th graders mirrors that
of the 3 rd graders in many respects. Overall, performance for
complex words is better than that for simple words, which is
caused chiefly by the large differences at the low-frequency
range. Moreover, overall scores indicate better performance
for high-productive than for low-productive derived words.
However, when looking at the frequency ranges separately,
two noticeable differences with the 3 rd graders data pattern
are observable.
First, at the high-frequency range monomorphemic words
and high-productive derivations are now yielding similar
scores. We believe that this is due to a ceiling effect, both
categories scoring close to maximum. Second, at the lowfrequency range low-productive derivations surprisingly
enough elicit best performance. This could be partly
ascribed to a growing morphological knowledge in general
and for low-productive suffixes in particular, also supported

Table 4. Mean definition scores with SD of the 6 target conditions of the 6 th graders in experiment 2
Morphological structure

Mean scores

Derivations with a high-productive suffix

Derivations with a low-productive suffix
Monomorphemic words

High-frequent words
1.94 (0.07)
1.74 (0.21)
1.91 (0.10)

Low-frequent words
1.25 (0.64)
1.33 (0.50)
0.88 (0.62)

Average
1.59
1.54
1.39

Average

1.86

1.15

1.51

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R. Bertram, M. Laine and M. M. Virkkala

by the now non-significant difference between high- and

low-productive suffixes in the additional chi-square analysis
on suffix knowledge. However, on the basis of this
explanation one would expect equal performance for highand low-productive derivations and not that the latter
outperforms the former. This unexpected difference then is
most probably caused by the (almost significantly) higher
average root frequency for the low-productive derivations in
comparison to the average root frequency of the highproductive ones. As noted before, frequency of exposure is
one of the most consistent and important factors in
triggering differential performance patterns in lexical
processing. This root frequency effect would be yet another
line of evidence that at the low-frequency range children
effectively compute the syntax=semantics of complex words
on the basis of the constituent morphemes.

GENERAL DISCUSSION
Morphological knowledge matters. As already shown by
previous studies (most notably, Anglin, 1993, and Nagy &
Anderson, 1984), children acquire a more extensive vocabulary by making use of their ability to analyze and
comprehend words via morphological constituents. The
general picture that arises from this study is that on top of
that they have a greater understanding of morphologically
complex than simple words when the word types are tightly
matched on all relevant factors. However, we were able to
acquire a more detailed picture by manipulating factors such
as frequency of occurrence and suffix productivity in a
relatively unexplored but from a morphologically point-ofview very interesting language, namely Finnish.
Suffix productivity turned out to be an important
differentiating factor. High-productive derivations were
understood best by children of both the 3 rd and the 6 th
grade, although in the latter grade performance on lowproductive derivations seemed to approach that on highproductive ones. Why would suffix productivity be so
important in vocabulary acquisition? A reasonable answer
on this question could be given by referring to what Tyler
and Nagy (1989) call relational knowledge. They define this
type of knowledge as the ability to recognize morphological
relations between words that share common morphemes
such as work and worker, or for that matter, worker and
thinker. It is not hard to see that a morphological pattern
that gets reinstated regularly in many word formations at
both input and output will be acquired earlier and more
strongly than a pattern that is encountered or produced less
often. In general, it becomes more and more apparent that
affixal properties have a huge impact on processing of
morphologically complex words (e.g., Bertram et al., 1999;
Bertram et al., 2000b; Burani, Dovetto, Thornton, &
Laudanna, 1997; Laudanna & Burani, 1995; Schreuder &
Baayen, 1995).
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Scand J Psychol 41 (2000)

In this study frequency of occurrence interacts with

morphological structure. Most notably, knowledge of
monomorphemic words at the low-frequency range is rather
poor. Given the fact that particularly at this frequency range
words are represented only weakly, if at all, this does not
come as a surprise. Whereas for complex words children can
fall back upon more familiar constituent morphemes, the
lack of sub-lexical structure does not allow children to do
the same with monomorphemic words. The data patterns
for low-frequent derived words are in line with models such
as the AAM model (Caramazza et al., 1988) or the MR
model (Frauenfelder & Schreuder, 1992) which claim that
the morpheme-based route is the rule for complex words at
this frequency range. At the high-frequency range, we also
find a differential performance pattern for complex words in
comparison to monomorphemic words. This is going against
the predictions of most models as they generally assume that
the full form route is taking care of lexical access and
retrieval for such items. If children would base their
definitions purely on the full form, one should not have
observed a difference between the derived and monomorphemic words as we did. The effect of morphology at this
frequency range might be linked to the lexical-statistical
properties of the Finnish language. Finnish is a language
with an extremely rich morphology in which any given word
can appear in hundreds or even thousands of different word
forms (Karlsson & Koskenniemi, 1985). Therefore a Finnish
language user will have to resort to morphology in
production and comprehension far more often than users
of morphologically restricted languages such as English and
Dutch. In that respect it does not come as a surprise that
young Finnish children are more sensitive to word-internal
morphological structure than their Indo-European agemates.
Thus frequency, suffix productivity and language all seem
to affect the role that morphological structure plays in
vocabulary acquisition. Therefore it is hazardous to make
bold statements about complex words or even derived=
inflected words in general. Moreover, one should already be
careful in item selection not to represent a certain category
with a variety of affix types which differ in many
dimensions. The more general notion of this study is that
children benefit greatly from utilizing morphology in
determining word meanings. This might be particularly
handy while they are engaged in listening to speech or in
reading texts with a high number of infrequently used
words. As shown in this study, it is especially in the lowfrequency range that they will get by with a little help from
their morphemic friends.
We wish to thank Jukka Hyona, Christina Burani, William Nagy,
one anonymous reviewer and Pekka Niemi for their helpful
comments on an earlier version of this paper. The Turun Sanomat
Company kindly provided us with a massive corpus of written
Finnish. This study was financially supported by the Academy of
Finland (grant #27774 to Matti Laine), the Centre of International

Scand J Psychol 41 (2000)

Mobility (CIMO) and the Graduate School of Psychology, financed
by the Finnish Ministry of Education.

NOTES
1
There are exceptions to this observation. Lewis and Windsor
(1996), for instance, assessed the effects of suffix productivity on
nonsense derivations. The more productive the suffix, the better
production and comprehension performance on the nonsense
derivations was observed.
2
We define a morphological family as the group of derived and
compound words that are sharing the same root. Thus words like
``worker'', ``work-man'', ``unworkable'' belong to the same morphological family. In a recent article Bertram, Baayen, & Schreuder
(2000a) assess the effects of morphological family size on lexical
processing.
3
The database mentioned here has compiled words of articles of
the Turun Sanomat, the second largest newspaper in Finland. The
compilation stretches from 1.4.1994 to 30.6.1996. There are 22.7
million word forms divided over 1, 483, 912 distinct word types.
Nouns are clearly the largest grammatical class in this database; the
two other major classes, verbs and adjectives, account for 118, 521
and 219, 984.
4
This percentage is actually even lower, for the low-productive
derived word types are still included in the count of 26, 355, since
they are not recognized by the automatic morphological parser
employed in the tagging of our lexical database.
5
In order to assess the degree of productivity for certain
derivational affixes of Finnish, a production experiment with 37
adult participants was conducted in which the participants had to
create as many words as possible with a given suffix in a limited
amount of time. For the high-productive suffixes -jA, -Us, and
-ntA, the growth rate (see Baayen, 1994) was 0.322, 0.491, and
0.289, respectively. For the low-productive suffixes -mO, -stO,
and -lA, the growth rate was 0.275, 0.201, and 0.113, respectively.
6
A two-tailed t-test for independent samples revealed that the
root frequency of the two derivation conditions was matched indeed
at both frequency ranges (low-frequency range t2(28) < 1; highfrequency range t2(28) 1.05, p2 < 0.30), even though the absolute
difference in the latter range seems quite large (181 vs. 314). This
difference, however, is caused by one outlier in the high-productive
derivation condition with a root frequency of 1638. Without this
item the average root frequency for high-productive derivations
would have been 219.

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Received 4 March 1999, accepted 8 October 1999

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