Productive use of derivational morphology by deaf college students

The ability of deaf college students to take advantage of derivational morphology is examined in an experiment on vocabulary acquisition. Using a paired-associate task, the deaf subjects were found to learn pseudoword-word pairs faster when semantically related words (e.g., book and read) were paired with derivationally related pseudowords (e.g., RALP and RALPIFY) than when they were paired with unrelated pseudowords (e.g., NARK and STRITIFY). These results converge with evidence obtained in other studies in indicating that deaf students are able to take advantage of English morphology when reading. © 1993, Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.