Structure, form, and meaning in the mental lexicon: evidence from Arabic

Abstract

Does the organization of the mental lexicon reflect the combination of abstract underlying morphemic units or the concatenation of word-level phonological units? We address these fundamental issues in Arabic, a Semitic language where every surface form is potentially analyzable into abstract morphemic units – the word pattern and the root – and where this view contrasts with stem-based approaches, chiefly driven by linguistic considerations, in which neither roots nor word patterns play independent roles in word formation and lexical representation. Five cross-modal priming experiments examine the processing of morphologically complex forms in the three major subdivisions of the Arabic lexicon – deverbal nouns, verbs, and primitive nouns. The results demonstrate that root and word pattern morphemes function as abstract cognitive entities, operating independently of semantic factors and dissociable from possible phonological confounds, while stem-based approaches consistently fail to accommodate the basic psycholinguistic properties of the Arabic mental lexicon.

Root and Pattern Effects in the Processing of Spoken Non-Words in Arabic

“…This converges very closely with the findings from other studies on Arabic that used real word stimuli mainly utilizing priming experiments (e.g. Boudelaa & Marslen-Wilson, 2011;2015).…”

“…Ample evidence for this role comes from studies conducted by Boudelaa and Marslen-Wilson (e.g. 2005;2013;2015). Using priming tasks these studies have maintained that lexical access in Arabic is characterized by a process of morphological decomposition of words into roots and patterns.…”

“…For example, Boudelaa and Marslen-Wilson (2013) used an auditory priming task and showed that both standard and dialectal Arabic show similar root and pattern priming effects. Similarly Boudelaa and Marslen-Wilson (2015) used cross-modal priming experiments to investigate the processing of complex forms in Arabic. Three major subdivisions were compared: deverbal nouns, verbs and primitive nouns.…”

The development of a measure of root awareness to account for reading performance in the Arabic language: A development and validation study

“…Studies in several languages that vary in typology and degree of orthographic transparency have indicated that morphological awareness (MA) contributes to reading achievement in Indo-European, Logographic, and Semitic languages (Bar-On & Ravid, 2011; Berninger, Abbott, Nagy, & Carlisle, 2010; Carlisle, 1995, 2000; Kirby & Bowers, 2017; Kirby et al, 2012; Nagy, Berninger, & Abbott, 2006; Ravid & Schiff, 2006; Tibi & Kirby, 2017; Tong, McBride-Chang, Shu, & Wong, 2009; Wu et al, 2009). While the majority of studies to date have explored the effect of MA on reading skill in Indo-European languages, a few studies have provided evidence for the salient and unique role of MA in reading acquisition in Arabic (Abu-Rabia, 2002, 2007, 2012; Abu-Rabia & Shalhoub-Awwad, 2004; Abu-Rabia, Share, & Mansour, 2003; Layes, Lalonde, & Rebai, 2017; Schiff & Saiegh-Haddad, 2018; Tibi, 2016; Tibi & Kirby, 2017) and specifically for the critical role of root knowledge in recognizing Arabic words (Boudelaa & Marslen-Wilson, 2001, 2005, 2011, 2015; Saiegh-Haddad & Taha, 2017; Shalhoub-Awwad & Leikin, 2016; Taha & Saiegh-Haddad, 2017).…”

Contributions of linguistic typology to psycholinguistics

“…The role of stem-formation morphology in IndoEuropean vs. Semitic languages has featured prominently in psycholinguistic studies on this topic. It has been proposed that morphological processing in Semitic languages is substantially different from processing of other languages, due to the unique nonconcatenative morphology of these languages; see Bick et al (2011) for Hebrew andBoudelaa &Marslen-Wilson (2015) for Arabic. Unlike in Indo-European languages, many complex words in Hebrew or Arabic do indeed involve nonlinear combinations of consonantal roots -typically consisting of three consonants that carry the core lexical meaning -plus patterns consisting of vowels to encode grammatical features.…”