DOI: 10.2478/rjes-2013-0006
AFFIX ACQUISITION ORDER IN SERBIAN EFL LEARNERS
JELENA DANILOVIĆ
Faculty of Philology and Arts, University of Kragujevac
Email: [email protected],
JOVANA DIMITRIJEVIĆ SAVIĆ
Faculty of Philology and Arts, University of Kragujevac
MARTA DIMITRIJEVIĆ
Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš
Email: [email protected],
Abstract: Given that affix knowledge plays a vital role in the development of L1/L2 knowledge, the aim
of this paper is to explore Mochizuki and Aizawa’s (2000) notion about the order of affix acquisition in
the Serbian EFL context. We will attempt to analyze correlations between the EFL learners’ vocabulary
size and their affix knowledge and postulate the order of affix acquisition.
Keywords: affixes, derivation, production, reception, vocabulary size
1. Introduction: the Nexus between Vocabulary and Morphology
The past twenty years or so have witnessed a proliferation of studies in the field of
vocabulary learning which have, inter alia, ascertained the crucial role of morphological
awareness in the process of vocabulary acquisition. Not only does affix knowledge account
for the number of new words a learner can understand (Nagy et al. 1993), but it also
contributes to the expansion of L1 learner’s vocabulary – it grows rapidly from the fourth
grade through high school, adding circa 3,000 words a year, that is at a rate of several words
per day (Nagy and Herman 1987). Although, to our knowledge, there are no similar studies
with regard to L2 vocabulary learning, teaching of affixes is often recommended (Schmitt and
Zimmerman 2002, Milton 2009) and included in EFL pedagogical material in the form of
short explanations or instruction on the use of prefixes and suffixes. Researchers nowadays
agree that the growth of L2 derivational knowledge, alongside general language proficiency,
is also an incremental process, albeit one which can be considered relatively underresearched.
L1 researchers have, on the other hand, explored this issue in depth. Some of the most
significant findings that have accumulated over the years include the following: pre-school
children and first-graders have poor ability to produce appropriate derived forms (Berko
1958, Carlisle and Nomanbhoy 1993); fourth-graders can recognize base morphemes in
unfamiliar derivatives (Tyler and Nagy 1989), while eighth-graders can recognize the
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relationship between low frequency words and their suffixed derivatives (Wysocki and
Jenkins 1987). According to Nagy et al. (1993) mastering the use of affixation may continue
well into high school, yet even adult native speakers seem to have incomplete knowledge of
derivational morphology (Schmitt and Zimmerman 2002). The fact that affixes differ in terms
of frequency, regularity, predictability and productivity, i.e. that affix accessibility and
learnability is higher for some affixes than others, prompted Bauer and Nation (1993) to
develop a seven-level affix order that can facilitate reading and function as a basis for guided
teaching and learning. This list served as a reference point in a few articles focusing on L2
affix acquisition, some of which we will elaborate on in the next couple of paragraphs.
Given that the development of vocabulary knowledge is inextricably linked to
morphological awareness, more and more attention is nowadays being paid to various aspects
of this relationship in L2 learning and teaching. Among the pioneers is this area of research
were Schmitt and Meara (1997) who sought to investigate suffix and word association
knowledge on both receptive and productive tasks, together with vocabulary size and general
L2 proficiency of Japanese EFL learners, over a period of a single academic year. The results
they obtained showed that the subjects generally had weak awareness of derivational affixes,
performing best on inflectional affixes, although their ability to recognize and produce
suffixes did improve by 4% on the receptive task (from 63 to 67%) and 5% on the productive
task (from 42 to 47%). More importantly, Schmitt and Meara (1997) found a statistically
significant correlation between vocabulary size and affix knowledge (r = 0.41, p < 0.05)
which they interpreted as an indication that greater suffix knowledge contributes to greater
vocabulary knowledge. More recently, Hayashi and Murphy (2011) compared the
interrelatedness of vocabulary knowledge and morphological awareness in both Japanese ESL
learners and English native speakers by means of the receptive/productive vocabulary size test
(Schmitt, Schmitt and Clapham 2001, Laufer and Nation 1995) and receptive/productive
derivational affix test which they themselves had designed. The data collected corroborated
Schmitt and Meara’s (1997) findings in that inflectional morphology was once better known
than derivational morphology in L2 learners, who also demonstrated stronger receptive
morphological awareness than productive while the reverse was, in this regard, found to be
true for English native speakers. At the same time, the statistical analyses showed that
productive derivational knowledge correlated highly with both receptive (r = 0.84, p < 0.001)
and productive vocabulary size (r = 0.83, p < 0.001) for Japanese ESL learners but not native
speakers of English. Following Schmitt and Meara’s (1997) line of reasoning, the authors
surmise that the growth of productive morphological awareness can accelerate the
development of receptive and productive vocabulary.
2. Research Background
The first to explore the issue of L2 affix acquisition in a practical manner, by
determining the degree of understanding of both prefixes and suffixes, was Mochizuki
(1998a). His empirical work sought to determine a potential order of affix acquisition in the
Japanese EFL learning context. He targeted 82 affixes from Umeda’s (1983) lists of important
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prefixes and suffixes and designed the affix knowledge tests on the following premises: the
main function of prefixes is the attachment of lexical meaning to the base whereas the
primary function of suffixes is the change of word class. In other words, learners can be said
to have mastered prefixes if they understand their lexical meaning whereas to show that they
have mastered suffixes, they need to be able to understand their syntactic role. Each of the 26
prefixes was exemplified in a set of three English words, followed by a choice of four
different meanings which the prefix might have, all of which were in Japanese, e.g.
submarine
substandard
1. yobino [extra] 2. fukuno [vice]
subdivision
3. shitano [under] 4. umoreta [buried]
The suffixes were, similarly, presented in three exemplary English words alongside four word
class options: verb, noun, adverb or adjective, e.g.
discordance
1. noun
2. verb
vigilance
3. adjective
surveillance
4. adverb
The results of the tests taken by 127 first-year English majors demonstrated that the learners
were, on average, able to solve correctly 63% of the items on the prefix test, as well as 65% of
those on the suffix test. What is more, their understanding of affixes varied significantly, thus
making it possible for an accuracy order to be set up. This order implied that some affixes
were easier to learn than others, that is, that the differing learning burden associated with
English affixes could be put to use in L2 pedagogy. However, given that this study was based
on the use of real, existent words of English, as the author himself admitted (Mochizuki
1998a), the subjects who were familiar with the exemplary lexemes could have had an unfair
advantage over others, which undermined the reliability of his data.
Therefore, Mochizuki decided to redesign his tests and expand his research to the
interrelatedness of vocabulary and morphological knowledge, in another attempt to establish
the affix acquisition order for Japanese EFL learners (Mochizuki and Aizawa 2000). This
time pseudo-words were used as prompts rather than real words, and the selection of targeted
affixes was narrowed down to 29. In addition to two morphological tests aimed to gauge
prefix and suffix knowledge, 403 Japanese high-school and university students who
participated in the study took a receptive vocabulary size test (Mochizuki 1998b). The latter
was a modified version of Nation’s (1990) Vocabulary Levels Test consisting of five sections
that measured learners’ knowledge of up to 7,000 words. On average, the subjects answered
correctly 57% of the questions on the prefix test and 56% on the suffix test. The results
demonstrated a statistically significant correlation between receptive vocabulary size and
prefix knowledge (0.58), as well as receptive vocabulary size and suffix knowledge (0.65).
Moreover, learners whose vocabulary was larger scored better on affix knowledge tests (Table
1), which in turn means that affix knowledge increases in proportion to vocabulary growth.
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Table 1. Summary of Mochizuki and Aizawa’s (2000) results which can be viewed as the order of affix
acquisition (source: Milton 2009:144)
3. The Study
Inspired by the work of Mochizuki and Aizawa (2000) and the fact that their research
implied that there was a correlation between receptive vocabulary size and affix knowledge
whereas Hayashi and Murphy’s (2011) indicated that both productive and receptive
vocabulary size correlated with affix knowledge in L2 learners, we attempted to investigate
the relationship between Serbian upper-intermediate EFL learners’ receptive/productive
vocabulary size and their affix knowledge. Additionally, as Mochizuki and Aizawa (2000)
have interpreted the nexus between lexical and morphological knowledge as an indication of
the order of affix acquisition, we aimed to explore this issue and postulate a tentative affix
acquisition order for Serbian EFL learners, then compare our results with those obtained in
the Japanese EFL learning context (ibid.).
3.1. Participants
The subjects who participated in the study were 62 students enrolled in the first year of
the English language and literature program at the Faculty of Philology and Arts in
Kragujevac, Serbia. They were all, without exception, native speakers of Serbian whose level
of proficiency in English was assessed as B2 (CEFR) by means of the university entrance
exam in July 2011, prior to the morphological and vocabulary testing.
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3.2. Research Instruments
The subjects completed four different tasks for the purpose of this research: two
vocabulary tests and two affix knowledge tests. The vocabulary tasks intended to evaluate the
learners’ vocabulary size (VS) encompassed both dimensions of knowledge, the receptive and
productive one: Nation’s (1990) Vocabulary Levels Test was used as a receptive measure
whereas Laufer and Nation’s productive version of the Vocabulary Levels Test (Laufer and
Nation 1995, as reprinted in Nation 2001) served as a productive measure of vocabulary size.
These two tests each comprised five levels of word frequency: the 2,000-word level; the
3,000-word level; Academic Vocabulary/University Word Level; the 5,000-word level; and
the 10,000-word level. Moreover, both contained 90 test items, 18 per word frequency level,
but differed in format: the receptive VS test required the students to match 90
decontextualized words with their synonyms/definitions by choosing from multiple choices,
while the productive VS test involved eliciting appropriate word completions in 90 short
sentences, e.g.
Receptive vocabulary size task
1. business
2. clock
____ part of a house
3. horse
____ animal with four legs
4. pencil
____ something used for writing
5. shoe
6. wall
Productive vocabulary size task
He was riding a bic____. (bicycle)
On the other hand, affix knowledge tasks included the prefix and suffix test borrowed and
slightly adapted from Mochizuki and Aizawa (2000). The former tested the learners’
knowledge of prefixes by presenting 13 of them (i.e. anti-, pre-, re-, counter-, non-, un-, en-,
ex-, inter-, post-, in-, ante-, semi-) in three pseudowords per prefix, alongside four different
English synonyms/definitions, e.g.
antislimad
1. human
antikiofic
2. of antenna
antirachy
3. opposed
4. ancient
The sole difference between Mochizuki and Aizawa’s (2000) and our prefix test lies in the
fact that the Japanese authors had offered four potential prefix meanings in their learners’
native tongue, i.e. Japanese, while we resorted to using English as we believed that our
English majors had sufficient knowledge of L2 to be able to cope with the task.
On the suffix test, the participants were asked to choose the part of speech (noun, verb,
adjective or adverb) and thus indicate their knowledge of 16 suffixes (i.e. -able, -al, -ation, 81
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er, -ful, -ish, -ism, -ist, -ity, -ize, -less, -ly, -ment, -ness, -ous, -y), offered once more in
pseudowords, three per suffix, e.g.
rombortable quifable slomitable
n.
v.
a.
ad.
1
2
3
4
3.3. Procedure and Scoring
The four tests were administered by the researchers themselves in their regular
vocabulary and morphology classes at the very beginning of the 2011-2012 academic year,
during the first two weeks of October. To minimize fatigue, the testing sessions were held one
week apart: first the receptive vocabulary task and the prefix test were completed, followed by
the productive vocabulary test and the suffix test. At the onset of each session, the participants
received a brief explanation in Serbian about the contents of the tests, as well as a few
examples regarding the way these should be filled in (i.e. teacher’s demo). It was also pointed
out that the data were being collected for research purposes only and that they would in no
way affect the course grades. Although there was no time limit on any of the tasks, the
students managed to complete them in 60 minutes’ time in both testing sessions.
As far as scoring is concerned, responses on the affix knowledge tasks were scored as
either correct or incorrect, and the same goes for the two vocabulary tests. However, care was
taken with the Productive Vocabulary Levels Test, as in Laufer (1998), where mistakes
related to the grammatical form (e.g. orchid instead of orchids) or spelling (e.g. acide for
acid) were not penalized as long as lexical meaning was expressed correctly. The subsequent
quantitative analyses were performed by means of the statistical program SPSS 17.0.
4. Results and Discussion
Given that Nation (1990) judges scores of 80% or more as indicative of a mastery of a
particular vocabulary level, of the 62 students who took both the receptive test and the affix
knowledge test, 39 tested at either the 3,000 word level or the 5,000 word level. The rest were
dispersed between the 2,000 word level, Academic vocabulary and 10,000 word level. We
will therefore now proceed to analyze the results of these 39 students: twenty-two students
tested at the 3,000 word level, with an average vocabulary of 3,926 words (average of 78.51%
of the 5,000 most common words in English) whereas 16 students tested at the 5,000 word
level with an average vocabulary of 4,571 words (average of 91.42% of the 5,000 most
common words in English). The 3,962 word group did not test over 80% at subsequent levels
and neither did the 4,571 word group.
Next, to investigate the relationship between vocabulary size and affix knowledge, we
explored potential correlations by calculating Pearson’s r, then compared the number of
correct answers which the 3,000 and 5,000 word groups achieved on the prefix and suffix test
(Table 2). A moderate positive correlation was revealed between the overall receptive
vocabulary knowledge of both groups and prefix knowledge (r = 0.363, p < 0.05). On the
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other hand, no statistically relevant correlation was identified between the overall receptive
vocabulary size and suffix knowledge.
The data below show that the lower level group managed to, on average, correctly
answer 50.6% of the questions on the prefix test and 77% on the suffix test. The upper level
group performed better on both morphological tasks, solving 64.6% of the prefix test items
and 86.3% of the suffix test items. These findings, viewed together with the aforementioned
correlations, seem to suggest that the increase in general receptive vocabulary is closely
related to the growth of affix knowledge.
Table 2. Means and standard deviations for scores on morphological tests
In addition, we were also interested in finding out whether productive vocabulary of
our 3,000 and 5,000 word group students correlated with their affix knowledge. Similar to the
correlations demonstrated for receptive vocabulary knowledge, we noticed a statistically
significant correlation between the productive vocabulary size and prefix knowledge
(r = 0.357, p < 0.05), but none in the case of suffix knowledge.
If we now explore the results obtained for the two word groups in relation to their
performance on each of the prefixes/suffixes included in the affix knowledge test (Chart 1),
we see that the upper level group outdid the lower level one on the prefix test, providing a
higher number of correct answers for all but two prefixes, namely re- and ex-, occasionally
scoring the maximum number of points (for anti- and post-). It is also noticeable that the
degree of improvement on the scores varied significantly from one prefix to another, and that
the least known prefixes were, for both groups, ante- (13.6% vs. 23.5%) and in- (31.8% vs.
35.3%).
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Chart 1. Comparison of correct answers on the prefix test (%)
On the suffix test, however, a somewhat different picture emerges. Again, the upper
level group achieved the maximum number of correct answers twice (for -ation and -ism), but
this time they outperformed the lower level group in only 9 out of 16 instances (Chart 2),
while their scores dropped on -able (81.8% vs. 70.6%), -ful (77.3% vs. 76.5%), -ish (72.6%
vs. 70.6%), -ist (77.3% vs. 76.5%), -less (81.8% vs. 64.7%), -ly (90.9% vs. 88.2%) and -ous
(72.7% vs. 70.6%). At the same time, the degree of progress once more varied significantly
from suffix to suffix.
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Chart 2. Comparison of correct answers on the suffix test (%)
Finally, taking into consideration the fact that neither the receptive nor the productive
vocabulary size of Serbian EFL learners appeared to correlate with their suffix knowledge, as
well as the lack of progress in what regards vocabulary size, and with almost half of the
affixes appearing on the suffix test, we attempted to postulate only the prefix acquisition
order. In accordance with Mochizuki and Aizawa’s (2000) approach, we considered prefixes
known by more learners as an indication of them being acquired earlier than those known by
fewer learners. When the results of both word level groups are jointly analyzed, we arrive at
the following accuracy order:





post- (94.9%), anti- (92.3%), re- (89.7%)
semi- (79.5%), pre- (76.9%)
un- (64.1%), non- (61.5%), ex- (59%), counter- (56.4%)
inter- (46.2%), en- (46.2%)
in- (33.3%)
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
ante- (17.9%)
As we can see, there seem to be several groupings of prefixes in terms of the order of
acquisition, with the best known being post-, anti- and re-, and the least known in- and ante-.
Many of the errors with these two poorly known prefixes appear to be the result of the
confusion with similar prefixes: in- with en-, and ante- with anti-. In the case of the former,
the answer “causing” was offered for both of these prefixes, and it was frequently mistakenly
selected by our students as the appropriate meaning for in-; in the case of ante- and anti-, one
of the alternate meanings supplied for anti- was “opposed” while “opposite” was provided for
ante-. On the other hand, this may be the effect of the test itself given that the prefixes in- and
ante- were reported as least known by Mochizuki and Aizawa (2000) as well, even though
their test contained multiple choice answers in EFL learners’ native tongue, i.e. Japanese, and
not English. In other respects, though, the order of prefix acquisition we established for
Serbian EFL learners is not similar to the one set for Japanese EFL learners by the aforesaid
authors.
5. Conclusion
The aim of this study was twofold: to investigate the interrelatedness of vocabulary
size and affix knowledge, and to establish a tentative affix acquisition order for Serbian
upper-intermediate EFL learners. The data obtained are only partially in line with Mochizuki
and Aizawa’s (2000) findings, in that receptive vocabulary size was found to be moderately
correlated to the prefixal aspect of morphological knowledge but not the suffixal one.
Additional exploration of the relationship between productive vocabulary size and affix
knowledge yielded similar results: once more vocabulary correlated with prefix and not suffix
knowledge. Moreover, a detailed analysis of the scores achieved by the two different
vocabulary level groups on the prefix test indicated that the growth of vocabulary knowledge
was intertwined with an improved morphological awareness.
It is important to note that the prefix and suffix test, though both designed as measures
of receptive knowledge, i.e. in a multiple choice format, did in fact pose two different tasks
before the participants. In our opinion, the suffix test was much easier as it assessed learners’
familiarity with suffixes through parts of speech. Since our subjects were upper-intermediate
EFL learners with a long history of learning English (ranging from eight to ten years as was
the common practice in Serbian primary and secondary education until recently) and English
majors at that, it is perhaps not surprising that they performed well on the suffix test and
outdid their Japanese counterparts. This could, in turn, also have been instrumental in the
differences between Mochizuki and Aizawa’s (2000) and our results. It is, nevertheless, hard
to understand why the scores which our upper level vocabulary students gained on individual
suffixes were not consistently better than those achieved by the lower level group.
When Serbian EFL learners’ accuracy on the prefix test was interpreted as the order of
affix acquisition, we learnt that this order differed for Japanese and Serbian learners, which
may be an indication, as Mochizuki and Aizawa (2000) themselves noticed, that it depends on
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L1. This seems particularly plausible if we factor in the potential influence of cognate affixes
(cf. Dimitrijević Savić and Danilović 2011): the three best known prefixes on our list, post-,
anti- and re-, all have the same equivalents in Serbian (Klajn 2002).
More research is, therefore, needed if we want to gather more conclusive evidence
about the process of affix acquisition in the EFL learning/teaching context. The testing
instrument constructed by Mochizuki and Aizawa (2000) could be modified, to incorporate
the same approach to the evaluation of prefix and suffix knowledge. In addition, as both
Japanese and Serbian EFL learners had difficulty with polysemous prefixes, this aspect of
morphological awareness should also be carefully examined. Lastly, as our study made use of
a relatively small sample of subjects, a larger number of Serbian EFL learners of varying
levels of proficiency would certainly contribute to a deeper understanding of the interrelationships between various aspects of vocabulary and morphological knowledge.
Acknowledgements: This study was supported by project grant 178014 from the Ministry of
Education and Science of the Republic of Serbia.
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Notes on the authors:
Jelena Danilović was born in 1980 in Celje. She graduated from the Faculty of Philology,
University of Belgrade, in 2003. She is presently working on her PhD thesis concerning the
acquisition of English morphology in Serbian EFL learners. Besides morphology, her
research interests include vocabulary and L2 acquisition. She is employed as an English
language instructor at the Faculty of Philology and Arts in Kragujevac.
Jovana Dimitrijević Savić was born in 1977 in Niš. She was awarded a PhD in linguistics
from the University of Melbourne in 2005. Jovana’s research has mainly focused on
bilingualism and sociolinguistics. She lectures at the Faculty of Philology and Arts in
Kragujevac.
Marta Dimitrijević was born in 1981 in Niš. She received her MA in linguistics from the
Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš, in 2010. She is the author of several papers in the
field of English article acquisition. She works as a lector of English at the Faculty of
Philosophy, University of Niš. Her research interests primarily include applied cognitive
linguistics.
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