Morphological knowledge as a predictor of receptive vocabulary for Swedish L1 and L2 school-aged children

The aim of this study was to assess to what extent receptive vocabulary could be explained by morphological knowledge, language majority/minority background and socioeconomic status (SES) for Swedish 8–11-year-old children. A total of 89 children participated, of whom n = 47 were L1 speakers (language majority) and n = 42 were L2 speakers (language minority). Morphological knowledge (MK) was assessed in a cloze test where children chose appropriate derivational affixes (suffixes and prefixes) for gap sentences presented in picture contexts. Receptive vocabulary was assessed using a norm-referenced standardized multiple choice-test. The results showed that morphological knowledge and receptive vocabulary were strongly correlated, and that MK significantly predicted receptive vocabulary outcomes, even when controlling for SES and L1/L2. The results indicated that SES could better explain the variance in receptive vocabulary than L1/L2 background. L2 students from higher SES outperformed L2 students from lower SES in both MK and receptive vocabulary, indicating that SES was more strongly associated with morphological knowledge and receptive vocabulary than L1/L2 background.