Among morphological tasks, extracting a base word from a derived word
that does not share its part of speech (e.g., popular from popularity) may have
special relevance for accessing the meaning of novel derived words encountered
while reading. This process of morphological analysis requires the integration of
lexical knowledge of particular derivations suffixes and root morphemes with the
metalinguistic ability to recognize these units and dissect them. As such, it can be
characterized as involving both word-specific knowledge and a word-general
metalinguistic skill. Because this process has the potential to give readers access to the meaning of novel words that they encounter in text, it may facilitate improved
reading comprehension performance.