Journal Article

Morphophonemic Awareness of English Derivatives by Iraqi College Students

Younus, Majed Rasim

2011

Overview

Foreign language competence must necessarily include all aspects that a native speaker may be assumed to have. One such aspect is morphophonemics which deals with the ways that morphological and phonological processes interact with each other. Learners of English as a foreign language should develop a morphophonemic awareness of morphologically complex words. In other words, they should be aware that certain sound changes occur to base words when affixes are attached, including vowel, consonant and stress changes. On the whole, learners need to be aware of various aspects of English derivatives such as: spelling, pronunciation, affixation rules and syntactic classes as determined by suffix types. Awareness of these aspects would help learners in using English derivatives properly. The present paper attempts to find out whether Iraqi college students are capable of identifying the phonological changes of base words which are caused by affixation. Two principles of the theory of lexical phonology have been adopted as bases of analysis .These are the principles of cyclic phonological rules and level ordering rules. To carry out the investigation, a test is constructed aiming at eliciting Iraqi college students' responses which are then discussed and analyzed by using the relevant statistical tools and this analysis verifies the hypothesis that errors incorporating base word stress (78.12) are more frequent than those incorporating base word vowels (51.5).

• Publisher: جامعة بغداد - كلية الآداب
• Subject: العراق / اللغة الإنجليزية للناطقين بغيرها / تعليم اللغات / طلاب الجامعات / علم الأصوات