Linguistic Factors related to Greek and Latin Roots’ Knowledge: Origin and Frequency
Abstract
Middle-school students struggle with expository texts (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study [PIRLS], 2011), many of whose words are composed by roots originated from Greek or Latin language (ex.: Green, 2008). In recent research, factors such as low surface frequency (Cervetti et al., 2015) or high abstractness (Hiebert et al., 2019) has been found to entail word comprehension. This descriptive research aims to verify if root origin, word frequency and root frequency are related to the knowledge of Greek and Latin roots among 34 French-speaking sixth graders. Results showed that students produce more errors on the meaning of Latin roots than Greek roots. However, no relationship was observed between word frequency or root frequency and students’ performance on Greek and Latin roots knowledge test.
Keywords
Greek and Latin roots, Domain-specific academic vocabulary, Root origin, Word frequency, Root frequencyReferences
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