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Non-concatenative morphemes in language processing: evidence form modern standard Arabic
Authors:
BOUDELAA, S. & MARSLEN-WILSON, W.D.
Reference:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Spoken Word Access Processes 23 - 26, Nijmegen, The Netherlands: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
Year of publication:
2000
CBU number:
4168
Abstract:
Two cross-modal priming experiments focussed on the use of word patterns and roots as morphemic units in deverbal nouns in Modern Standard Arabic. In the first experiment, prime and target pairs sharing a word-pattern yield cross-modal priming only if their overlap is both at the level of the phonological structure and the syntactic meaning of the word pattern. In Experiment 2, primes and targets sharing a root but co-varying in terms of their semantic relationship were used. Significant cross-modal priming occurs not only when prime and target share a root and a transparent semantic relationship but also, and more importantly when they share a root and an opaque semantic relationship. These results point clearly to word-patterns and roots being lexical units in MSA. They indicate that the language processor picks up on highly abstract morphological units, which never surface on their own.
