| Summary: | There are several studies on the morphological acquisition of English as L2 but
the errors committed by the participants have not been studied in depth. The objective in
this article is to analyze the errors in a derivation test to determine percentage and typo
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logical differences between Mexican participants with different proficiency in English. The
methodology was exploratory of quasi-experimental type. It focused on four nominalizing
suffixes controlling their level of difficulty and productivity, and the cognate status and
frequency of nouns. The design of the test was based on the proposal of Carlisle (2000).
The errors were classified following Marín (2013) and analyzed based on the levels of
difficulty in acquiring English affixes from Bauer and Nation (1993) and the morpholog-
ical derivation knowledge aspects of Tyler and Nagy (1989). The results show that both
the percentage and the type of errors vary according to the level of proficiency of the
participants. A large percentage of use of inflectional suffixes was found, that is, of lower
difficulty level; and it was evidenced that the distributional knowledge of the suffixes is the
last to be acquired. These findings may be useful for teaching purposes
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