Abstract
We report on an auditory masked priming study designed to test the contributions of semantics and morphology to spoken word recognition in Hebrew. Thirty-one native Hebrew speakers judged the lexicality of Hebrew words that were primed by words which either share their root morpheme and a transparent semantic relationship with the target (e.g. poreʦ פּורץ ‘burglar’ priming priʦa פּריצה ‘burglary’) or share their root morpheme but lack a transparent semantic relationship with the target (e.g. mifraʦ מפרץ ‘gulf’ priming priʦa פּריצה ‘burglary’). We found facilitatory priming by both types of morphological relatives, supporting that semantic overlap is not required for morphological priming in Hebrew spoken word recognition. Thus, our results extend the findings of Frost, Forster, & Deutsch’s (1997) Experiment 5 to the auditory modality, while avoiding confounds between root priming and Hebrew’s abjad orthography associated with the visual masked priming paradigm. Further, our results are inconsistent with models of word processing which treat morphological priming as reflecting form and semantic coactivation, and instead support an independent role for root morphology in Hebrew lexical processing.
Highlights
Morphology is often described as being at the intersection of phonology and semantics, in that morphemes represent a unique combination of form and meaning that remains stable across words (e.g. Hockett 1958: 123)
Models of word recognition can be divided into two main types according to the role which they ascribe to morphology in lexical processing: Decomposition-based models assume that, during processing, language users decompose complex words into their constituent morphemes, which activate the lexical representations of those morphemes, leading to the word’s successful recognition by way of these morphemic units (e.g. Frost et al 1997, Rastle et al 2004)
All participants were recruited either from the Department of Linguistics at Tel Aviv University (TAU) or from Amazon Mechanical Turk’s (MTurk) worker pool
Summary
Morphology is often described as being at the intersection of phonology and semantics, in that morphemes (typically) represent a unique combination of form and meaning that remains stable across words (e.g. Hockett 1958: 123). Morphology is often described as being at the intersection of phonology and semantics, in that morphemes (typically) represent a unique combination of form and meaning that remains stable across words An ongoing question concerns the role of morphology as separate from that of form and meaning in lexical processing. Models of word recognition can be divided into two main types according to the role which they ascribe to morphology in lexical processing: Decomposition-based models assume that, during processing, language users decompose complex words into their constituent morphemes, which activate the lexical representations of those morphemes, leading to the word’s successful recognition by way of these morphemic units (e.g. Frost et al 1997, Rastle et al 2004). Words are recognized holistically, and any apparent effects of morphology may reflect the combined effects of phonological and semantic coactivation Words are recognized holistically, and any apparent effects of morphology may reflect the combined effects of phonological and semantic coactivation (e.g. Baayen et al 2011; Milin et al 2017) (see Milin et al (2018) for a review of morphological processing in models of word recognition)
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