This monograph studies research conducted for the purpose of investigating the relationship between vocabulary recognition and morphological knowledge during the early and middle elementary school years. The findings suggest that lexical development can be characterized in terms of increasing morphological complexity, and as a child ages, the proportion of known complex words that the child figured out by analyzing their morphological structure increased.

Jeremy M. Anglin received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1970. He is associate professor of psychology and currently the chair of the Developmental Psychology Division at the University of Waterloo. His research interests include language acquisition and cognitive development. Several of his recent studies have focused on lexical, semantic, and conceptual development during childhood. He has previously been a consulting editor for the Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development and has served on the editorial board of Child Development. He is the author of The Growth of Word Meaning and of Word, Object, and Conceptual Development and the editor of Beyond the Information Given: Studies in the Psychology of Knowing.

George A. Miller received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1946. He is a cognitive psychologist at Princeton University.

Pamela C. Wakefield received her B.S. from Upsala College in 1982. She is a member of the research staff at Princeton University.