EARLY MORPHOLOGICAL AWARENESS AND ITS EFFECT ON BUILDING LEXICAL COMPETENCE AMONG LEARNERS: A NEUROLINGUISTIC STUDY
Given its mechanisms that can help the learner develop the strategy of analyzing the morphological structure of words, Morphological Awareness plays a vital role in the process of acquiring lexical items and organizing lexical memory. Furthermore, it not only renders the representation of linguistic units less confusing but also enables us to apprehend how it functions and how it is organized within the lexicon as well. Thus, this will eventually triggers the mental mechanism responsible for building the linguistic ability of learners. That is to say, cognizing about how the mental lexicon works can inevitably help us answer various questions regarding the organizational engineering of the linguistic levels of the word in the mind as well as the mechanisms involved in the process of comprehension and production. Thus, it can be said that morphological awareness plays a significant role in building lexical competence, particularly that is related to the morphological characteristics which characterize the Arabic language through the perception of its modes of operation and its organization in the mental lexicon.
Keywords: Morphological awareness, Lexical memory, mental lexicon, Comprehension, Production, lexical competence