The Effect of Opacity and Productivity of Spanish Suffixes on Derived Words

Studies have shown the impact of morphological knowledge on grammatical awareness and reading achievement (Carlisle, 1995; Marinellie and Kneile, 2012). There are factors, such as low productivity and opacity, which make derived words difficult to understand. Those and the deep structure of opaque derived words need further investigation (Gayatri, 2013; Serrano-Dolader, 2006).The goal of this study is to develop a scale of opacity along a continuum based on the number of changes to the lemma when the suffix is applied. Each of these changes was measured over a corpus of 550 derived words with productive Spanish suffixes (DRAE, 2001). 130 native Spanish high-school students and a small group of advanced non-native college students of Spanish were tested on the scale.Results reveal the usefulness of the scale to assess processing and reading difficulties in Spanish. Validation results indicate that all participants react in a similar way when facing basic morphological decisions.