What can we learn from the morphology of Hebrew? A masked-priming investigation of morphological representation.

Abstract

All Hebrew words are composed of 2 interwoven morphemes: a triconsonantal root and a phonological word pattern. the lexical representations of these morphemic units were examined using masked priming. When primes and targets shared an identical word pattern, neither lexical decision nor naming of targets was facilitated. In contrast root primes facilitated both lexical decisions and naming of target words that were derived from these roots. This priming effect proved to be independent of meaning similarity because no priming effects were found when primes and targets were semantically but not morphologically related. These results suggest that Hebrew roots are lexical units whereas word patterns are not. A working model of lexical organization in Hebrew is offered on the basis of these results.

Orthographic characteristics speed Hindi word naming but slow Urdu naming: evidence from Hindi/Urdu biliterates

“…In contrast, Experiment 1 in the present research provides clear evidence of form priming in Hindi, despite the use of relatively long prime exposures (136 and 680 ms). The absence of form priming in Urdu in our data mirrors the lack of formbased priming in Hebrew word naming reported by Frost et al (1997). However, the Urdu results are singular in light of recent evidence of form priming in both Hebrew (Frost & Yogev, 2001) and Arabic (Boudelaa & Marslen-Wilson, 2005), using very brief prime exposure durations of less than 100 ms.…”

“…Thus, word-pairs such as /targil/-/taklit/ (Hebrew: exercise-record) and /kamaal/-/Zamaal/ (Arabic: perfection-beauty; phonetic transcription follows Frost et al, 2005) did not show priming. Further, Frost et al (1997) reported an absence of form-based priming even when Hebrew words were named aloud.…”

“…Remarkably, Frost and colleagues (Frost, Forster, & Deutsch 1997;Frost, Kugler, Deutsch, & Forster 2005) found that in Hebrew as well as Arabic, form primes (i.e., primes that overlapped with targets in both phonology and orthography) failed to facilitate lexical decision. Thus, word-pairs such as /targil/-/taklit/ (Hebrew: exercise-record) and /kamaal/-/Zamaal/ (Arabic: perfection-beauty; phonetic transcription follows Frost et al, 2005) did not show priming.…”

The processing of root morphemes in Hebrew: Contrasting localist and distributed accounts

“…Thus, localist models typically assume that morphemic units are explicitly represented in the mental lexicon, such that morphological representations are discrete and non-distributed. Although some investigators within a localist approach have suggested that all morphologically complex words are listed in the lexicon independently of the base forms from which they are derived (e.g., Butterworth, 1983;Henderson, Wallis, & Knight, 1984), current opinion is moving more strongly towards some form of morphemic account in which analysis and decomposition occurs for most morphologically complex words (e.g., Baayen, 1991;Burani & Laudanna, 1992;Caramazza, Laudanna, & Romani, 1988;Laudanna, Burani, & Cermele, 1994;Frauenfelder & Schreuder, 1991;Frost, Forster, & Deutsch, 1997;Marslen-Wilson, Tyler, Waksler, & Older, 1994;Schreuder & Baayen, 1995;Taft, 1994).…”

“…Roots and word-patterns are not appended one to the other linearly, as in languages with concatenated morphology. Rather the consonants of the root are intertwined with the phonemes (and therefore, the corresponding letters) of the word-pattern (see Frost et al, 1997, for detailed description of Hebrew morphology). For example, the Hebrew word /tirkovet/ (meaning ''combination''), consists of the combination of the root morpheme r.k.v (conveying the meaning of ''combining'') with the nominal pattern ti--o-et which conveys the syntactic information that the word is a feminine noun (the dashed lines stand for the places where the root's consonants are to be inserted).…”