TY - JOUR
T1 - Productivity and priming
T2 - Morphemic decomposition in Arabic
AU - Boudelaa, Sami
AU - Marslen-Wilson, William D.
N1 - Funding Information:
Correspondence should be addressed to Sami Boudelaa, Linguistics Department, Faculty of Humanity & Social Sciences, United Arab Emirates University, PO Box 71117, A1 Ain, UAE. E-mail: [email protected] This work was supported by the Medical Research Council UK (U.1055.04.002.00001.01). The authors would like to thank Abdallah Megbli, Headmaster of the High School of Tataouine, Tunisia, for providing access to the participants who took part in the study. We thank Ian Nimmo-Smith, and other members of the Language Group at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, for their help. We are also thankful to the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of this work.
PY - 2011/5
Y1 - 2011/5
N2 - Word formation in Arabic involves the interleaving of two abstract morphemes-a root consisting exclusively of consonants and conveying semantic meaning, and a word pattern comprised primarily of vowels and conveying phonological and morpho-syntactic information. In masked and cross-modal priming experiments, we probed the processing relationship between these two morphemes during word recognition by examining the roles of word pattern and root productivity (family size) in producing word pattern priming in Arabic deverbal nouns. Co-varying word pattern and root productivity in a 2 × 2 design, we found that priming was determined entirely by the productivity of the root. Even very productive word patterns did not prime if they appeared in the context of an unproductive root. This pattern of results, which is identical in cross-modal and masked priming, indicates the importance of the root in driving the on-line decomposition of Arabic surface forms into their constituent morphemes.
AB - Word formation in Arabic involves the interleaving of two abstract morphemes-a root consisting exclusively of consonants and conveying semantic meaning, and a word pattern comprised primarily of vowels and conveying phonological and morpho-syntactic information. In masked and cross-modal priming experiments, we probed the processing relationship between these two morphemes during word recognition by examining the roles of word pattern and root productivity (family size) in producing word pattern priming in Arabic deverbal nouns. Co-varying word pattern and root productivity in a 2 × 2 design, we found that priming was determined entirely by the productivity of the root. Even very productive word patterns did not prime if they appeared in the context of an unproductive root. This pattern of results, which is identical in cross-modal and masked priming, indicates the importance of the root in driving the on-line decomposition of Arabic surface forms into their constituent morphemes.
KW - Arabic patterns
KW - Morphological productivity
KW - Obligatory decomposition
KW - Priming
KW - Roots
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U2 - 10.1080/01690965.2010.521022
DO - 10.1080/01690965.2010.521022
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:79957559738
SN - 0169-0965
VL - 26
SP - 624
EP - 652
JO - Language and Cognitive Processes
JF - Language and Cognitive Processes
IS - 4-6
ER -