A student studies prefixes and suffixes to understand word meaning. Which concept is this?

• A. Morphemes
• B. Morphology
• C. Plot Pyramid
• D. Choral Reading

Answer: (A)

Morphemes—the smallest units of meaning in words. Prefixes and suffixes are morphemes called affixes that attach to a base word to change its meaning or its part of speech. Studying how these units combine is morphology. For example, adding un- to happy changes the meaning to “not happy,” and adding -ing or -s changes a word’s tense or number. Chaining these together helps readers decode and understand word meaning more efficiently. The other options relate to story structure or reading strategies, not to the parts that carry meaning inside words.