The role of the root morpheme in mediating word production in Hebrew

Abstract

Using the picture–word interference paradigm with auditorily presented distractors, we investigated the effect of morphological processes on producing words, as distinct from phonological and semantic effects. The study was performed in Hebrew, a language with a nonconcatenated morphology, and focused on the derivational root morpheme, which is distributed nonsequentially throughout the word. The semantic, morphological, and phonological relatedness between the auditory distractor word and the picture name was manipulated, as well as the Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA) between the distractor and picture presentation. Compared with an unrelated distractor, the results revealed a facilitatory morphological effect within the time window of SOAs from −200 to 300 ms. This effect was distinct from the semantic and phonological effects in the time course and/or direction. These results extended both the experimental evidence for the role of morphology in language production to a language with a nonconcatenated morphological structure, and previous findings in word perception in Hebrew to the realm of word production.