Standardized pictorial stimuli and predictors of successful picture naming are not readily available for Gulf Arabic. On the basis of data obtained from Qatari Arabic, a variety of Gulf Arabic, the present study provides norms for a set of 319 object pictures and a set of 141 action pictures. Norms were collected from healthy speakers, using a picture-naming paradigm and rating tasks. Norms for naming latencies, name agreement, visual complexity, image agreement, imageability, age of acquisition, and familiarity were established. Furthermore, the database includes other intrinsic factors, such as syllable length and phoneme length. It also includes orthographic frequency values (extracted from Aralex; Boudelaa & Marslen-Wilson, 2010). These factors were then examined for their impact on picture-naming latencies in object- and action-naming tasks. The analysis showed that the primary determinants of naming latencies in both nouns and verbs are (in descending order) image agreement, name agreement, familiarity, age of acquisition, and imageability. These results indicate no evidence that noun- and verb-naming processes in Gulf Arabic are influenced in different ways by these variables. This is the first database for Gulf Arabic, and therefore the norms collected from the present study will be of paramount importance for researchers and clinicians working with speakers of this variety of Arabic. Due to the similarity of the Arabic varieties spoken in the Gulf, these different varieties are grouped together under the label "Gulf Arabic" in the literature. The normative databases and the standardized pictures from this study can be downloaded from http://qufaculty.qu.edu.qa/tariq-khwaileh/download-center/ .

Research into lexical retrieval requires pictorial stimuli standardised for key psycholinguistic variables. Such databases exist in a number of languages but not in Arabic. In addition there are few studies of the effects of psycholinguistic and morpho-syntactic variables on Arabic lexical retrieval. The current study identified a set of culturally and linguistically appropriate concept labels, and corresponding photographic representations for Levantine Arabic. The set included masculine and feminine nouns, nouns from both types of plural formation (sound and broken), and both rational and irrational nouns. Levantine Arabic speakers provided norms for visual complexity, imageability, age of acquisition, naming latency and name agreement. This delivered a normative database for a set of 186 Arabic nouns. The effects of the morpho-syntactic and the psycholinguistic variables on lexical retrieval were explored using the database. Imageability and age of acquisition were the only significant determinants of successful lexical retrieval in Arabic. None of the other variables, including all the linguistic variables, had any effect on production time. The normative database is available for the use of clinicians and researchers in the Arab world in the domains of speech and language pathology, neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics. The database and the photographic representations will be soon available for free download from the first author's personal webpage or via email.

Within the domain of inflectional morpho-syntax, differential processing of regular and irregular forms has been found in healthy speakers and in aphasia. One view assumes that irregular forms are retrieved as full entities, while regular forms are compiled on-line. An alternative view holds that a single mechanism oversees regular and irregular forms. Arabic offers an opportunity to study this phenomenon, as Arabic nouns contain a consonantal root, delivering lexical meaning, and a vocalic pattern, delivering syntactic information, such as gender and number. The aim of this study is to investigate morpho-syntactic processing of regular (sound) and irregular (broken) Arabic plurals in patients with morpho-syntactic impairment. Three participants with acquired agrammatic aphasia produced plural forms in a picture-naming task. We measured overall response accuracy, then analysed lexical errors and morpho-syntactic errors, separately. Error analysis revealed different patterns of morpho-syntactic errors depending on the type of pluralization (sound vs broken). Omissions formed the vast majority of errors in sound plurals, while substitution was the only error mechanism that occurred in broken plurals. The dissociation was statistically significant for retrieval of morpho-syntactic information (vocalic pattern) but not for lexical meaning (consonantal root), suggesting that the participants' selective impairment was an effect of the morpho-syntax of plurals. These results suggest that irregular plurals forms are stored, while regular forms are derived. The current findings support the findings from other languages and provide a new analysis technique for data from languages with non-concatenative morpho-syntax.

Research into anomia has been carried out in English and many Indo-European languages extensively, but not in Arabic. Previous studies have investigated predictors of successful lexical retrieval after anomia, and access to syntax during lexical retrieval. The aim of the current study is to examine impaired lexical retrieval in Arabic at two levels: predictors of lexical retrieval, and access to syntax during lexical retrieval, via checking whether syntactic cueing (using the definite article /əl-/ 'the' prior to nouns) facilitates noun retrieval in Arabic aphasia, with regard to naming speed and accuracy, and establishing the determinants of aphasic noun retrieval in Arabic. Three participants with anomia following CVA named 186 pictures from a published Arabic database in two conditions: bare noun condition, and determiner + noun condition. Participants' accuracy and reaction times were compared in both conditions. Furthermore, a multiple regression analysis was carried out to test the effect of psycholinguistic variables (visual complexity, name agreement, age of acquisition, imageability and other intrinsic variables) on successful lexical retrieval to determine predictors of Arabic noun retrieval after anomia. The production of the determiner + noun in picture naming facilitated spoken naming in all three participants. Nouns produced with the determiner were produced faster and more accurately than their counterparts produced without the determiner. The two participants with agrammatism produced morpho-syntactic errors in the bare noun condition, but not in the determiner + noun condition, suggesting that the determiner sets up a noun phrase frame with a slot for the noun to be filled, resulting in responses that are faster and more accurate. Age of acquisition and imageability were the only two variables that had influence across the participants. These results have theoretical and clinical implications for lexical retrieval models.

To date, normative psycholinguistics research has mainly focused on establishing norms for producing databases for concrete words using standardized pictures, while abstract words have been subject to much less attention. Understandably, the fact that the first can be represented visually helps in formulating picture-naming tasks to elicit verbal identification for pictures representing nouns and verbs, which greatly contributes to language experiments in both theoretical and clinical studies. The present study argues for the equal importance of studies that aim to develop databases for abstract words, as language use is not restricted to picturable/concrete concepts. We provide norms for a set of 165 abstract nouns, 56 abstract verbs and 109 abstract adjectives, collected from healthy speakers of Arabic. Using rating tasks, norms for imageability, age of acquisition, and familiarity are established. Linguistic factors such as syllable length and phoneme length are also accounted for. We also include orthographic frequency values (extracted from AraLex;Boudelaa and Marslen-Wilson, 2010). The norms for the processing of abstract words collected in the current study present a valuable resource for researchers and clinicians working with speakers of Arabic. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first dataset of abstract words for the Arabic language.