Adults, at least mine, store words in their brains as opposed to storing preffixes, suffixes, roots and then playing with them to form new words, to help them understand "new" lexical terms. Much as I encourage and help them work out the meaning of derivates, they only get there if you help them break down the word into smaller bits of meaning. With help. They don't do it autonomously.
I have noticed too that their brains take the words the know of something they are familiar with but is not a cognate. Let me give you an example:
I was doing a listening to Susana and the man said " trusting staff to..." and my student said "she says something about confidence" as in trust in Spanish is confianza, a cognate but a false friend somehow. Another example is Carmen understood strange when the listening man said strain. The word strain is not part of their active, nor passive in her case, vocabulary so their brains searched for whateve was most similar to the sound of strain that she knew. So the more active vocabulary and their very correct pronunciation or at least familiarity of how the word sounds in English is important if they want to improve their listening skills. In one word, input input input. Repeated input, revision, revising, rereading, listening, etc.
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