Arabic Morphology in the Neural Language System

Abstract

There are two views about morphology, the aspect of language concerned with the internal structure of words. One view holds that morphology is a domain of knowledge with a specific type of neurocognitive representation supported by specific brain mechanisms lateralized to left fronto-temporal cortex. The alternate view characterizes morphological effects as being a by-product of the correlation between form and meaning and where no brain area is predicted to subserve morphological processing per se. Here we provided evidence from Arabic that morphemes do have specific memory traces, which differ as a function of their functional properties. In an MMN study, we showed that the abstract consonantal root, which conveys semantic meaning (similarly to monomorphemic content words in English), elicits an MMN starting from 160 msec after the deviation point, whereas the abstract vocalic word pattern, which plays a range of grammatical roles, elicits an MMN response starting from 250 msec after the deviation point. Topographically, the root MMN has a symmetric fronto-central distribution, whereas the word pattern MMN lateralizes significantly to the left, indicating stronger involvement of left peri-sylvian areas. In languages with rich morphologies, morphemic processing seems to be supported by distinct neural networks, thereby providing evidence for a specific neuronal basis for morphology as part of the cerebral language machinery.

How Linearity and Structural Complexity Interact and Affect the Recognition of Italian Derived Words

“…Such theories have been supported by both behavioral and computational modeling studies (e.g., Gonnerman et al 2007;Li and MacWhinney 1996;Mirković et al 2011;Penke and Westermann 2006;Raveh 2002), but research with neuropsychological patients, along with behavioral and neuroimaging studies with normal participants, demonstrate that morphological processing can be dissociated from other aspects of language, and that morphemes and words can exist as independent units (Boudelaa et al 2009;Bozic et al 2007;Laudanna et al 1997;Marslen-Wilson et al 2008;Miceli et al 2004;Shapiro and Caramazza 2003).…”

“…models about the representation and processing of morphological information have been proposed, the literature remains fragmented and contradictory. An early and influential theory by Taft and Forster (1975), more recently identified as the "Obligatory Decomposition" process (Boudelaa et al 2009;Gold and Rastle 2007;Marslen-Wilson and Tyler 2007;Meinzer et al 2009;Taft 1979Taft , 2004Taft and Ardasinski 2006) claims that only morphemes and their combinatorial constraints are part of the mental lexicon, meaning that complex words are typically broken down and processed according to the constituent morphemes. Other models have advocated that morphological information is either represented holistically, in whole word form (Bozic et al 2013;Bybee 1985Bybee , 1995Cole et al 1989;Davis et al 2004), or proposed a "Dual-Route" theory that allows morphemic and whole word representations to coexist and be accessed via separate routes depending on a word's linguistic features (Caramazza et al 1988;El Yagoubi et al 2008;Leminen et al 2011;Longtin and Meunier 2005;Meunier and Longtin 2007;Niswander et al 2000;Rastle and Davis 2003;Schreuder and Baayen 1995;Taft 1994).…”

“…A full review of this literature is beyond the scope of this paper, but these factors include (a) the semantic and phonological transparency of affixed forms (Bertram et al 2000b;Bozic et al 2013;Gold and Rastle 2007); (b) a change of the grammatical category (Marslen-Wilson et al 1996;Meinzer et al 2009;Vannest et al 2005); (c) stem and surface frequency (Niswander et al 2000;Taft 1979;Taft and Ardasinski 2006;Vannest et al 2011); (d) language typology (Assink et al 2000;Boudelaa et al 2009;Bozic et al 2013); (e) configurational properties of affixes (Di Sciullo 1997;Kuperman et al 2008;Tsapkini et al 2004); (f) category information of the stem Hudson and Buijs 1995;Kuperman et al 2008); (g) word internal structure (Hudson and Buijs 1995;Kuperman et al 2009;Meinzer et al 2009); and (h) linearity, i.e., the temporal order of information, specifically, the presentation order of morphemes (Cutler et al 1985;Hudson and Buijs 1995;Kuperman et al 2008Kuperman et al , 2009. Among the aforementioned studies, proponents of multi-dimensional theories and others have investigated many of these and other factors simultaneously in the same study due to their flexible conceptualization of the word recognition process (Baayen et al 2007;Dasgupta et al 2015;Fruchter and Marantz 2015;Kuperman et al 2008Kuperman et al , 2009Kuperman et al , 2010.…”

Aralex: A lexical database for Modern Standard Arabic

“…Our own experimental research and similar research into other Semitic languages, particularly Hebrew, underlines the primacy of morphemes, showing how roots and word patterns govern lexical organization and lexical processing in this language family (Boudelaa & Marslen-Wilson, 2005;Boudelaa et al, 2010;Frost, Forster, & Deutsch, 1997). This means that any lexical resource that does not provide reliable statistics about roots and word patterns will be of limited use to the experimental psychologist interested in the study of Arabic and, indeed, to anyone interested in the statistical structure of Arabic, whether a language…”

MoGAR: Morphological Generator for Arabic Language using Rule-based Generation Process

“…By its morphological and syntactic properties, the Arabic language is considered a language difficult to master in the field of automatic language processing [5], [6]. It is thus essential to understand the different mechanisms and concepts (basic lexicon) related to the Arab morphology, in order to develop a system of morphological generation…”