Development of morphological awareness in English as a Foreign Language: A Latent Growth Curve Modeling study

This longitudinal study examined the impact of learners’ first language (L1) background and affix neutrality/word regularity (i.e., whether suffixation changes the form of base words) on the growth of English morphological awareness (MA). University students with Chinese and Korean as their respective L1 completed the same set of tasks three times over two semesters that measured three aspects of derivational MA: relational, syntactic, and distributional. Unconditional latent growth curve models (LGM) showed a pattern of linear growth for all MA aspects. Further LGM analyses with group as a time-invariant covariate revealed that for the intercept, there was no significant group difference for relational MA; however, Korean-L1 learners significantly outperformed Chinese-L1 learners for distributional MA, whereas a converse pattern was found for syntactic MA of regular words. No significant group difference, however, was found in the slope for any MA aspect. Finally, Wald tests through parameter constraints on a parallel growth model showed that the intercept was greater for regular words than irregular words, which was true across groups and MA aspects. These findings underscore a complex interplay of learner internal (L1) and external (affix neutrality and skill facets) factors in MA development in a foreign language context.