Morphological units in the Arabic mental lexicon.
Standard views of morphology in Modern Standard Arabic hold that surface word forms comprise at least two morphemes: a three-consonantal root conveying semantic meaning and a word pattern carrying syntactic information. An alternative account claims that semantic information is carried by a bi-consonantal morphological unit called the etymon. Accordingly, in the form [batara] the core meaning is carried not by the tri-consonantal root morpheme [btr] but by the etymon morpheme [b,t] which surfaces in other forms like [batta] "sever", [batala] "cut off" with the same meaning "cutting". Previous experimental research in Semitic languages has assumed the tri-consonantal root/word pattern approach. In cross-modal and masked priming experiments we ask whether the etymon, as a more fine-grained two-consonantal morphological unit, can yield the morphological priming effects typically obtained with tri-consonantal root morphemes. The results clearly show that two words sharing an etymon do facilitate each other both in cross-modal and masked priming even though they do not share a root, controlling for semantic and for form overlap effects. The bearing of these results on theories of morphological processing and representation is discussed.
Boudelaa
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S
MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK. sami.boudelaa@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk
Marslen-Wilson
W D
WD
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D018912:Arabs / Q000523:psychology; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D008960:Models, Psychological; D010470:Perceptual Masking