Abstract
Educators and therapists in the Arab world have not been able to benefit from the recent integration of basic behavioral science with neuroscience. This is due to the paucity of basic research on Arabic. The present study is a step toward establishing the necessary structure for the emergence of neuro-rehabilitory and educational practices. It focuses on the recent claim that consonants and vowels have distinct representations, carry different kinds of information, and engage different processing mechanisms. This proposal has received support from various research fields, however it suprisingly stops short of making any claims about the time course of consonant and vowel processing in speech. This study specifically asks if consonants and vowels are processed differentially over time, and whether these time courses vary depending on the kind of information they are associated with. It does so in the context of a Semitic language, Arabic, where consonants typically convey semantic meaning in the form of tri-consonantal roots, and vowels carry phonological and morpho-syntactic information in the form of word patterns. Two cross-modal priming experiments evaluated priming by fragments of consonants that belong to the root, and fragments of vowels belonging to the word pattern. Consonant fragments were effective primes while vowel fragments were not. This demonstrates the existence of a differential processing time course for consonants and vowels in the auditory domain, reflecting in part the different linguistic functions they are associated with, and argues for the importance of assigning distinct representational and processing properties to these elements. At broader theoretical and practical levels, the present results provide a significant building block for the emergence of neuro-rehabilitory and neuro-educational traditions for Arabic.
Highlights
Neuro-rehabilitation and neuro-education are two nascent scientific disciplines that are informed by research from cognitive neuroscience and behavioral psychology (Taub et al, 2002; Devonshire and Dommett, 2010; Ansari et al, 2012; Hook and Farah, 2012)
In terms of processing dynamics this study shows that there is a differential time course at which information about consonants and vowels is mapped onto internal representations
Partial information about consonants is continuously used to generate lexical hypotheses, while partial information about vowels is ineffective in accessing the lexicon; only full information about the word pattern provides a basis for lexical access
Summary
Neuro-rehabilitation and neuro-education are two nascent scientific disciplines that are informed by research from cognitive neuroscience and behavioral psychology (Taub et al, 2002; Devonshire and Dommett, 2010; Ansari et al, 2012; Hook and Farah, 2012). Neuro-education seeks to create a better understanding of how we learn and how knowledge about the functional properties of the brain can be harnessed to create more effective teaching methods, curricula, and educational policies (Hardiman et al, 2009; Carew and Magsamen, 2010) Despite their relatively recent history both disciplines are making significant strides toward helping with rehabilitory and educational processes. Imaging studies have revealed that human infants at risk of dyslexia (i.e., with immediate family members who suffer from dyslexia) show atypical neural responses to changes in speech sounds, even before they are able to understand the semantic content of language (Leppänen et al, 2002) Such a finding allows for the early identification and remediation of potential learning disorders
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