What is Synforms?

Synforms: An Introduction Synforms are lexical items similar in their phonological, graphic and/or morphological features. Laufer (1988) showed that they could create problems not only for learners of English (including advanced learners) but also for native speakers. She divided them into ten categories (which you can find in the article linked to below by Kokic, 2008) dependent on the reason for their similarity - for example, derivation from a similar root, differences in spelling due to a single vowel or consonant etc. Some examples of synforms taken from Laufer's  categories would be  historic/historical, staff/stuff, price/prize, manual/menial, loose/lose Both Laufer and Kocic, and other researchers have looked at which of these features cause more difficulty than others. However, their research seems to have been purely quantitative - did the respondents make more errors in one of the ten categories than another - and based on multiple-choice tests, where the items were presen…