Poster C44, Wednesday, August 21, 2019, 10:45 am – 12:30 pm, Restaurant Hall
Form, meaning, and morphology in Arabic masked priming: An ERP study
Ali Idrissi1, Tariq Khwaileh1, Eiman Mustafawi1, John Drury1;1Qatar University
INTRODUCTION. Transposed letter priming (jugde-JUDGE) and other orthographic/form priming found in Indo-European languages (Forster et al. 1987; Ferrand & Grainger 1992; Perea & Rosa 2000; Brysbaert 2001) have not been reliably found for Semitic (Frost et al. 2005; Valen & Frost 2009, 2011; Perea et al. 2010). Coupling this with demonstrations of Semitic root priming (Frost et al. 2000; Boudelaa & Marslen-Wilson 2005) has led to the suggestion that lexical memory for Hebrew/Arabic may be qualitatively different in organization. However, non-word primes derived from real word targets by single root letter replacement have been shown to yield priming in Arabic (Perea et al. 2014), dovetailing with literature questioning the status of the consonantal root as a morphological unit of lexical organization in Semitic (Idrissi 2018). PRESENT STUDY. Our masked priming ERP study manipulated prime duration (40/120 ms) between-participants and examined six conditions: (i) identity; (ii) root/meaning identity ([Saliib - maSluub] “cross – crucified”); (iii) root without meaning identity ([Saliib - Salaaba] “cross- hardness”), (iv) transposed real root orthographic overlap ([Saliib - baSal] “cross - onions”); (v) semantic relatedness ([Saliib – qasaawisa] “cross - pastors”); (vi) unrelated prime-target pairs. Condition-(iv) involved either local/adjacent root letter transpositions (e.g., tri-consonantal roots with 123 order preceded by real-word primes with identical consonants in 213 or 132 orders), or non-adjacent transpositions (e.g., 123 targets with 321, 312, or 231 primes). Real root primes like these have been previously found not to yield priming in Arabic (Perea et al. 2010; note other studies have used non-word primes). METHODS. Trials consisted of #-marks (#######; 500 ms), prime (40 or 120 ms), target (300 ms; using a larger font than the primes), and response/blink prompts. The task was go/no-go semantic categorization: half of the pairs (180) used names of animals/objects. Participants responded only if they saw animal name. Critical trials (30 items in each of (i)-(vi) = 180 critical pairs) did not require behavioral response. EEG was continuously recorded from 24 scalp electrodes (250 Hz EEG; 25 Ag/AgCl electrodes; Ground: AFZ; left-mastoid reference, re-referenced to linked mastoids offline. EEG pre-processed with a 0.1–30 Hz BPF). ERPs were examined within a 1000 ms epoch time-locked to prime onset (-200 to 0 ms baseline). Preliminary results reported here are based on 29 Qatari Arabic native-speaker adult participants (N=15 for short-prime (40 ms); N=14 for long-prime (120 ms)). RESULTS & DISCUSSION. When prime duration was short (40 ms) priming reduced ERP amplitudes for all conditions except semantics (v). Importantly, this includes our root letter transpositions/(iv), contra expectations based on most previous literature. With long prime exposure (120 ms) all conditions (including semantics/(v)) showed priming but with differences effect size. Identity showed the largest effects, followed by root priming (ii/iii), with semantic primes and root-transpositions (iv/v) showing (equivalently) the smallest effects. We argue (1) that there may not, in fact, be such qualitative cross-linguistic differences with respect to orthographic priming, and (2) previously observed Arabic consonantal root effects in masked priming may be only due to orthographic rather than morphological overlap.
Themes: Morphology, Meaning: Lexical Semantics
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)