Research Symposium

BIO

My name is Diogo Silva Barbeito Vogel. I am an undegraduate student at Florida State University, double majoring in Economics and Real Estate. I am originally from Itaipava, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and I am passionate about understanding the complexities of economic systems, financial markets, and public policy. My research interests include political economy, rent seeking, and the implications of concentrated benefits and diffused costs in government policy.

Beyond academics, I will serve as an Orientation Leaders and currently work at FSU Campus Rec. These demonstrate my leadership and a commitment to community engagement. I am also deeply passionate in photography and fitness.

With aspirations of a career in economic policy, consulting or investment strategy I aim to leverage my education and research in order to influence financial and governmental decision making.

Morphological Complexity of FL ELA Texts

Abstract

Intro: Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units of language (Carlisle, 2003). A word is morphologically complex when it includes more than one morpheme, often in the form of affixes (prefixes or suffixes) added to root or base words. Academic language is morphologically complex (Nagy & Anderson, 1984). A student’s ability to read morphologically complex language is correlated with their understanding of morphology, which can be improved through explicit instruction (Goodwin et al, 2010). While recent studies have investigated the morphological content of British children’s books (e.g., Dawson et al., 2023), American educators lack current, detailed information on the morphology of American English Language Arts (ELA) text. Our research question is as follows: What percentage of words in a corpus, or collection, of ELA texts have one or more affixes when compared against a morphological database?
Method: We will analyze public-domain English Language Arts texts recommended in Florida’s educational standards. The texts will be compiled into a corpus from which individual words will be compared against the MorphoLex (Sanchez-Gutiérrez et al., 2017) database to determine their morphological complexity. Words found in both our corpus and MorphoLex will be compared by the number of affixes they contain.
Results: We expect to find that between 45-55% of words in our corpus will have one or more affixes, making them morphologically complex.
Conclusion: This study may shed light on the complexity of American ELA texts. The instructional implication of such data may significantly improve students' learning experiences.

Keywords: Morphology, ELA, Complexity