The etymology of modern English vocabulary content introduction

'Synforms' (Similar Lexical Forms)

The largest category of DT words is that of 'synforms' pairs/groups of words

similar in form. (For criteria of synform similarity, classification of synforms and
discussion of the problems they raise)² Generally speaking, some synforms are similar in sound (cute/acute; available/valuable; conceal/cancel; price/prize; some are morphologically similar (economic/economical; industrious/industrial; reduce/deduce/induce).
Synformic confusions may have two sources: the learner might have learnt one word of the pair/group, but since its representation in the memory id insecure or defective, a similar word which shares most of its formal features, might look identical to it. Or, the learner might have studied both synforms but since his knowledge of both is insecure, he is not sure which word form is associated with which meaning. Whatever the reason, the result is misinterpreting one synform as its counterpart.
Checking deceptive transparency. In section two it was suggested that, in the framework of second language learning, a modified definition of transparency could be adopted, which would account for both inter- and intralingual clues in detecting the meaning of words. The notion of deceptive transparency was then introduced. Deceptively transparent words were defined as words which seemed to provide clues to their meaning but in fact did not. DT words were found to belong to one of five categories: words with a morphologically deceptive structure, idioms, false friends, words with multiple meanings and synforms. The empirical verification of deceptive transparency as a factor of difficulty id the subject of the next section.[5]
One could argue against DT as a factor of difficulty by claiming that:
(a) learners misinterpret all kinds of words, not necessarily the DT ones; therefore the number of errors induced by DT words would not be significantly higher than the number of errors induced by non-DT words; (b) when the learner thinks he knows a word, but does not, this is not due to specific word characteristics (those of DT words); therefore if tested for lack of awareness of ignorance, there would be no significant difference between DT and non-DT words. The study was designed with the above arguments in mind. It addressed the following research questions:
(a) Is the frequency of errors induced by DT words different from the error frequency induced by non-DT words?
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^ Cartr feor a survey & McCarthy 1988

b) Is the learners' awareness of their ignorance of DT words different from the

awareness of their ignorance of non-DT words? Question (b) was subdivided into two questions:
(i) when faced with unknown DT words, will the learners recognise them as unfamiliar more often than not recognise them as such?
(ii) when learners are unaware of their ignorance of words, is it in the case of DT words more often than with non-DT words?
Procedure The subjects were 100 first year university students taking a course in English for Academic Purposes. They were all high school graduates 5 , native speakers of Hebrew and Arabic. The study was conducted in two stages. In the first stage, learners were given an unseen text on a subject of general nature with comprehension questions 6 , to ensure that they were reading for comprehension. The tasks were
(a) to answer the questions;
(b) to underline unknown words in the text. 'Unknown' meant a word that could not be understood from text context. The answer sheets with comprehension questions and the texts with the underlined words were collected. Stage two followed immediately. The learners were given a clean copy of the same text and a list of 40 words from it (20 Dt, 20 non-DT) and were asked to translate them in text context. The translations were collected and compared with the underlined words in the texts. In other words, for each student, a comparison was made between the words students CLAIMED they did not know (out of the 40 selected ones) and the words they ACTUALLY did not know.
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^ Winitz , Schouten-van Parreren 1989).
The comparison between translation lists and underlined words yielded three
possible results:
(a) The learners translated some words correctly and did not underline them in the text.
(b) The learners did not know the translation of some and underlined them, i.e. they were sometimes aware of their ignorance.
(c) The learners misinterpreted some words and did not underline them in the text, i.e. they were sometimes unaware of their ignorance.
Three scores were given to each student:
(a) Error score: the number of errors on the translations list: for DT words and non-DT words.[7]
(b) Awareness score: the total number of instances in which the learner was aware of his ignorance: in the case of DT words; and non-DT words.
(c) Reading comprehension score on the basis of his answers to comprehension
questions. The following grid illustrates how the information about the two first scores was coded.
Results Error scores in DT and non-DT words were compared by a matched t-test. The number of errors in DT words was significantly higher than in non-DT words (1=1.67 p<0.05). The number of +aware instances was compared with the number of -awareinstances for DT words. The latter was significantly higher than the former (t=8.46 p<0.0005). This means that DT words are not recognised as unfamiliar more often than they are recognised as such.
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^ Smuggler London 1976

The number of -aware instances was compared for DT and non-DT words. The

frequency of -aware for DT words was significantly higher than that for the non-DT words (t=10.31 p<0.0005). This means that unawareness of ignorance is more frequent with DT words than with other words.
The relationship between awareness of unknown DT words and reading
comprehension was measured by correlating the 'awareness' scores with reading
comprehension scores. Pearson product moment correlation was .65, significant at .0001 level.
Discussion The study compared DT and non-DT words with regard to:
(a) number of errors induces by each group of words.
(b) the extent to which learners were conscious of their ignorance of words in each
group (the DT and non-DT).
(c) the relationship between awareness of unknown DT words and success in reading comprehension.
The results showed that
(a) Errors were more frequent with DT words.
Students were less aware of their ignorance with DT words than with non-DT ones. There was a significant correlation between reading comprehension and learners' awareness of unknown DT words.
It can be argued, therefore, that deceptive transparency is indeed a factor which has an effect on comprehension.
DT Words And Reading Comprehension
As mentioned before, the correlation between awareness of DT words and reading
scores was .65, significant at .0001 level, though correlations do not show cause-effect relationships between the variables, they do indicate the degree of common variance. In our case, it seems that about .4 of variance in reading could be accounted for by the degree of awareness of DT words. However, I will try to argue for a possible cause-effect relationship between the two.[11]
When a foreign learner does not understand a word in the text, he has the following options: ignore it (if he considers it unimportant), look it up in a dictionary, ask
someone who knows its meaning, or try to guess it from con-text. Many researchers of reading and pedagogues have emphasized the importance of guessing as a strategy of successful reading presupposes awareness, on the part of the learner, that he is facing an unknown word. If such awareness is not there, no attempt is made to infer the missing meaning. This is precisely the case with deceptively transparent words. The learner thinks he knows then and assigns the wrong meaning to them, distorting the immediate context on this way.
But this may not be the end of the distortion process. The misinterpreted words will sometimes serve as clues for guessing words which the learner recognises as unknown, which may lead to larger distortions. Graphically, the process can be represented in the following manner:
awareness of ignorance of DT words -> misinterpretation of DT words -> distortion of immediate context -> using distorted context for further inter-pretation -> distortion of larger context. Here is an example of a distorted sentence resulting from misinterpretation of three words. The original sen-tence was:
'This nurturing behaviour, this fending for females instead of leaving them to fend
for themselves may take many different forms.' 'nurturing' was confused with 'natural', 'fending' with 'finding', 'leaving' with 'living'.
The result was the following:
'Instead of living natural life, natural behaviour, females and children find many
different forms of life.' One might wonder about the lack of syntactic resemblance between the original and the misinterpreted sentences. Such incongruencies in sentence structure show that students are willing to rely on lexical clues more than on syntactic ones; they are even prepared to impose a sentence structure on the idea they have already arrived at via lexis. If the learner had recognised 'nurture, fend, leave' as unknown words in the given example, he might have looked up or guessed their meaning and arrived at a different interpretation.
The suggested cause-effect relationship between awareness of DT words and
reading comprehension can therefore be explained as follows. A better awareness of DT words is necessary for attempting to find their meaning. Such an attempt will result in a larger number of correctly interpreted words. These will in turn reduce the density of unknown words. Such reduction will result in an increase in contextual clues which are necessary for outstanding additional new words. This understanding will increase the total number of correctly interpreted words. A larger number of known words will be an asset to global comprehension of the text.
DT Words And Vocabulary Testing. One way of checking the vocabulary size of a learner is by giving him a list of words (real and non-existing) and asking him to reply 'yes' to every known word and 'no' to every unknown one. (E.g. Meara and Buxton, 1987). The calculation of the score takes into account the number of real words identified as familiar and the number of 'identifications' of the nonsense words. The more nonsense words are claimed to be known, the lower is the credibility of the subject. However, if the text includes many DT words among its items, the learner may be making 'yes' responses to unknown words not be-cause of low acceptance threshold, but due to genuine unawareness of his ignorance. How this might affect the test score is not clear. It could be simpler to exclude such words from the test than to find a suitable correction formula.
Errors In DT Words And The Mental Lexicon
The study did not attempt to investigate the characteristics of the mental lexicon.
However, some of me errors caused by DT words can provide some information about the organisation of L2 words in the memory. Investigations have indicated that while in the native speaker's mental lexicon there are strong semantic links between the words, the connections between words in additional languages are primarily phonological.
Synformic errors, particularly confusion of phonologically similar words (cute/acute, valuable/available), provide additional evidence for such organisation. In searching for the right word, the learner selects its neighbour in the lexicon which sounds similar, but is erroneous.

Another interesting issue that has been debated is whether words com-posed of

root and affixes are stored as single units or whether the stems and affixes are stored separately. Errors in the words with a deceptively morphological structure seem to support the latter (lexical decompositions hypothesis).
The learner might store the prefix 'dis-' separately and therefore interpret 'discourse' as 'without direction', combining what looks like two separate units if meaning. Also the confusions of morphological synforms (industrial/industrious, economic/economical) might result from storing the suffixes separately and substituting one by an-other.