Auditory masked priming in Maltese spoken word recognition

Abstract

This study investigated lexical access in Maltese, an understudied Semitic language. We report here on a series of four lexical decision experiments designed to test the hypothesis that the consonantal root and the word pattern may each prime lexical access in Maltese. Priming of morphologically related forms is generally taken as evidence consistent with morphological decomposition in processing. Here, we used two speech priming techniques: auditory priming in which primes and targets were equally audible, and auditory masked priming in which primes are masked from conscious perception by volume-attenuation and compression. Our results show priming of targets by forms sharing a consonantal root, but not by forms sharing a word pattern.