Semitic morphology is based on the combination of two abstract discontinuous morphemes, the word pattern and the root. The word pattern specifies the phonological structure and morpho-syntactic properties of the surface form, while the consonantal root conveys core semantic information. Both units play a crucial role in processing Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew. Here we use incremental masked priming to probe the time-course of word pattern and root activation in reading Arabic deverbal nouns and verbs. The morphological (word pattern and root), orthographic, and semantic relationship between prime and targets is varied over four stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) (32, 48, 64, and 80 ms). Results show distinctive patterns of activation for the two morphemic entities. Word pattern effects are transient, and detectable only at SOAs 48 and 64 in deverbal nouns and SOA 48 in verbs. Root effects are strong at all SOAs. This may reflect differences in the timing with which word pattern and root information can be extracted from the orthographic input, as well as differences in the roles of these morphemes in building internal lexical representations. Both types of morphemic effect contrast strongly with the effects of orthographic and semantic primes, where reliable facilitation is only obtained at the longest SOA (80 ms). The general pattern of results is consistent with the view that morphological effects in Semitic languages represent distinct structural characteristics of the language.

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Standard views of morphology in Modern Standard Arabic hold that surface word forms comprise at least two morphemes: a three-consonantal root conveying semantic meaning and a word pattern carrying syntactic information. An alternative account claims that semantic information is carried by a bi-consonantal morphological unit called the etymon. Accordingly, in the form [batara] the core meaning is carried not by the tri-consonantal root morpheme {btr} but by the etymon morpheme {b,t} which surfaces in other forms like [batta] ªseverº, [batala] ªcut offº with the same meaning ªcuttingº. Previous experimental research in Semitic languages has assumed the tri-consonantal root/word pattern approach. In cross-modal and masked priming experiments we ask whether the etymon, as a more ®ne-grained two-consonantal morphological unit, can yield the morphological priming effects typically obtained with tri-consonantal root morphemes. The results clearly show that two words sharing an etymon do facilitate each other both in cross-modal and masked priming even though they do not share a root, controlling for semantic and for form overlap effects. The bearing of these results on theories of morphological processing and representation is discussed. q

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