What is a morpheme, not necessarily surviving as a word in itself, from which words have been made by the addition of prefixes or suffixes?

A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in a language, and word roots serve as foundational components that can be combined with prefixes and suffixes to create new words. In this context, a word root does not need to function as an independent word; it can be a base element from which various words are formed by adding different affixes.

For example, the root "bio" meaning "life" can lead to the creation of words like "biology" or "biography" through the addition of prefixes and suffixes. This illustrates how a word root provides the core meaning, which can be expanded upon with additional morphemes.

The other options do not accurately capture the essence of what a morpheme is in this context. Vocabulary refers to the collection of words known and used, an acronym is a word formed from the initial letters of a series of words, and a speaker relates to a person who communicates verbally. None of these fundamentally represent the building block of meaning that a word root does.