A Normative Database and Determinants of Lexical Retrieval for 186 Arabic Nouns: Effects of Psycholinguistic and Morpho-Syntactic Variables on Naming Latency

Abstract

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.

Imageability, familiarity, and age of acquisition ratings for Arabic abstract nouns, abstract verbs and adjectives

“…Akinina, Malyutina, Ivanova, Iskra, Mannova, Dragoy, 2014;Bonin, Mèot, Chalard, & Fayol, 2002;Bonin, Peereman, Malardier, Mèot, & Chalard, 2003; Cameirao & Vicente 2010). Khwaileh et al (2014;2018) reported that this variable is a significant predictor of successful lexical retrieval in Levantine Arabic and Gulf Arabic.…”

“…According to Khwaileh et al (2014;2018), 'word frequency' is defined as "how frequent a word is used (spoken or written form) in a given language". The assumption is that the higher the frequency of a given word, the faster the processing and the more accurate the response in picture naming (Martein,1995;Nickels, 1997).…”

“…Second, most previously published normative databases are based on English and Indo-European languages that are either lexically, typologically or structurally related e.g. Dutch (Shao, Roelofs, & Meyer, 2014), Portuguese (Cãmeirao & Vicente, 2010), Spanish (Alonso, Fernandez, & Díez, 2015), Russian (Akinina, Malyutina, Ivanova, Iskra, Mannova, Dragoy, 2014), French (Bonin, Peereman, Malardier, Mèot, & Chalard, 2003;Bonin, Mèot, Chalard, & Fayol, 2002), Italian (Barca, Burani, & Arduino, 2002), or on other languages such as Turkish (Raman, Raman, & Mertan, 2014).There are three published normative datasets for Arabic: the Levantine-Arabic database (Khwaileh et al,, 2014), the Gulf Arabic nouns and verbs (Khwaileh et al, 2018) and the Tunisian-Arabic database (Boukadi, Zouaidi, & Wilson, 2016).…”

“…This motivation is understandable. According to Glaser (1992) and Khwaileh et al (2014), the picture naming task is the best experimental paradigm to yield spoken word production, as naming a picture is the first step towards using language. Nevertheless, language use is not restricted to pictureable/concrete concepts.…”

Norms for name agreement, familiarity, subjective frequency, and imageability for 348 object names in Tunisian Arabic

“…Norms have recently been established for Levantine Arabic, one of the DA varieties spoken in the Middle East (Khwaileh, Body, & Herbert, 2014). However, the ratings were collected for a different and smaller set (n = 186 pictures) than the commonly used Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) pictorial database (e.g., Alario & Ferrand, 1999;Cycowicz et al, 1997;Dimitropoulou et al, 2009;Manoiloff et al, 2010;Nisi et al, 2000;Raman et al, 2014;Sanfeliu & Fernandez, 1996;Tsaparina, Bonin, & Méot, 2011).…”