Formal and semantic effects of morphological families on word recognition in Hebrew. Issue 1 (2nd January 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Deutsch, Avital; Kuperman, Victor
• Is Part Of: Language, cognition and neuroscience. Volume 34:Issue 1(2019)
• Page Start: 87
• Page End: 100
• Publication Date: 2019-01-02
• Subjects: Hebrew -- lexical decision -- morphology -- word-patterns -- family-size effect; Psycholinguistics -- Periodicals; Linguistics -- Periodicals; Neurosciences -- Periodicals; Psycholinguïstiek; Cognitieve processen; Linguistics; Neurosciences; Psycholinguistics; Periodicals; 401.9
• DOI: 10.1080/23273798.2018.1513541
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2327-3798

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In Hebrew, content words are usually composed of two interleaving morphemes; roots which carry semantic information, and word-patterns which mainly carry grammatical information. The family size effect in languages with non-concatenative morphology has been previously examined only with respect to the root. The present study reports a lexical-decision experiment with 260 Hebrew nouns representing a variety of nominal word-patterns and roots. We observed independent facilitatory effects of morphological family sizes of the roots and the nominal word-patterns. The family size effect of the nominal word-pattern was stronger for words with low frequency. The novelty of these findings is in showing in a within-stimuli design that both morphemes have a role in defining the complex family effect in a language with non-concatenated morphology, despite the massive differences in their linguistic characteristics. The data provide evidence in favour of the proposed multi-dimensional structure of the Hebrew lexicon.