The Psycholinguistic Status of the Root in Modern Hebrew

Abstract

In this paper we describe an experiment designed to reveal the psycholinguistic status of the root in Modern Hebrew. The experiment was motivated by the following factors: (1) Major morphological theories set word-based (WB) constraints on possible morphological grammars, and certain theories address the lexical storage vs. decomposition debate. Prominent advocates of WB theory support the elimination of the root from contemporary Hebrew grammar, assuming that the stem and not the root and the pattern are stored in the lexicon. (2) Empirical research on this question conducted by linguists and psycholinguists necessitates such an experiment. A review of the above concepts is followed by a report on our experiment. We gave a coloring task to four groups: university students who were native speakers of Hebrew; primary school pupils who were native speakers of Hebrew; university students who were native speakers of Arabic; and university students who were native speakers of Russian. All Ss were given an identical sheet containing sixteen clearly typed Hebrew words. Ss were instructed to selectively color letters according to their free will. Statistical processing of the coloring outcomes revealed that, as opposed to the statistical null (H 0 ) hypothesis, letters were not colored at random: native Hebrew speakers selected letters that constitute the root of the words; native Russian speakers were ignorant of the root structure; and the Arabic-speaking group fell in between. The coloring of letters following other linguistic and non-linguistic criteria resulted statistically non-significant