An analysis by Korochkina and Rastle (2026) of words used in 1,200 popular British children’s books (7-16 years) found that nearly half of the words were made up of more than one morpheme (smallest part of a word that carries meaning), yet many of these words did not appear on British television and most of the words were rarely repeated and were rarely found across multiple books.
This means that when children encounter a complex word, they are unlikely to encounter the same word again within the same book, in other books or in every day spoken language. Consequently, understanding the meaning of these words, requires children to rely on their ability to break words into morphemes and then to have some understanding of the meaning of each of those morphemes.
However:
- Only about 1/3 of the morphemes within the words examined occurred in different words (e.g., un – unclean, unkind, unkempt).
- Isolating the morphemes in complex words can be difficult as the internal structure is not always obvious (e.g., deceive=de+ceive, but we never use ‘ceive’ in isolation).
- Some words appear to consist of multiple morphemes, but in actual fact don’t (e.g., brother≠broth+er).
Inferences:
- Reading provides an opportunity to experience morphology, but is not sufficient to learn the meaning and function of individual morphemes.
- It may be more beneficial to explicitly teach morphemes that are hard to identify or appear in misleading contexts, rather than more commonly occurring morphemes.
Reference
Korochkina, M., & Rastle, K. (2026). What can children learn about morphology from reading for fun. The Bulletin, 62, 16-18.