Conciencia morfológica y vocabulario disponible: un estudio evolutivo desde educación secundaria a la universidad / Morphological awareness and available vocabulary: An evolutive study from Secondary Education to College

Abstract

Contributions between lexical and morphological knowledge are bidirectional in the development of linguistic abilities. This relationship has been widely studied in the early educational stages, related to the development of reading comprehension, while not so broadly in adolescence and early youth. This paper addresses connections between lexical productivity, measured through an available lexicon task, and derivative morphological awareness in two groups of Secondary Education students (12- and 15-year-old) and a third group of first year of college students (18-year-old) with a pseudolongitudinal design. The results indicate that the task of free morphological production from a base and a suffix is the best predictor of available vocabulary, among the morphological skills incorporated into the study. Likewise, the results reinforce the need to incorporate metalinguistic morphological knowledge in pedagogical designs throughout all pre-university educational stages to promote vocabulary development.