Knowledge of receptive English morphology among Finnish university students: L2 learners’ morpheme recognition and its implications to vocabulary learning

Abstract Morphological knowledge involves understanding how morphemes, the smallest meaningful units of words, can be used to form words. However, not much is known about L2 learners’ English morpheme recognition in multimorphemic words. To the best of the author’s knowledge, no research exists on Finnish university students’ knowledge of English multimorphemic words. Finnish is a Finnic language of the Uralic language family, and as a non-Germanic language, its structures are very different from those of, e. g., English. The highly productive and rich morphological system of Finnish provides novel opportunities for research. The present study examines morpheme recognition, the most crucial aspect of receptive morphological knowledge needed for vocabulary acquisition, and intralexical factors that affect morpheme recognition. The participants, 694 Finnish-speaking university students, were administered word segmentation and vocabulary knowledge tasks, which were developed to fit the proficiency level of the Finnish participants. Using both Pearson and corrected item-total correlational analyses, the findings indicated that recognizing the root of a word was influenced significantly by the ability to break multimorphemic words into parts. The results add to our understanding of how morphological knowledge is constructed by advanced L2 English learners, as well as provide novel evidence for its receptive use in strategic vocabulary learning. This evidence highlights the importance of drawing learners’ attention to different morphological structures and the semantic role of roots. Based on the results, the pedagogical implications for L2 vocabulary learning are also addressed.