Linguistics Colloquium: Avital Deutsch

Avital Deutsch, Hebrew University

Title: The Interrelation between Root and Nominal-Pattern Extraction in the Morphological Decomposition of Hebrew Words in a Fast-Priming Procedure for Sentence Reading

Abstract:

In this lecture, I will present a number of studies that I conducted on morphological processes in mediating lexical access in Hebrew, mainly in the domain of written-word perception. The issue of morphological processes in word production will be mentioned briefly. I will focus on the two non-concatenated main derivational morphemes of Hebrew: the consonantal root that is embedded within a nominal and the verbal-pattern morpho-phonological unit. The main focus of the presentation will be on the interrelation between these two morphemes in the course of morphological decomposition during lexical access. This discussion will be preceded by a short overview of the main findings concerning each of these morphemes separately.

Research on written-word perception using the masked-priming paradigm for single-word reading has revealed the robust facilitative influence of roots and the verbal-patterns, but not nominal-patterns, on word recognition. This finding suggests that the Hebrew lexicon is organized and accessed via root units. However, the absence of a nominal-pattern influence creates theoretical difficulties for characterizing the process of morphological decomposition and extraction of root morphemes. Continuing research explored the hypothesis that the potential facilitative influence induced by a shared nominal-pattern was annulled in previous studies by an interference effect induced by the competition between the roots of two words derived from different roots but with the same nominal-pattern. By replacing experimental paradigms that are based on measuring the reaction time of ‘off-line’ tasks of single-word recognition in priming paradigms with more ecological experimental paradigms that are based on ‘on-line’ measures of fixation duration while participants are engaged in sentence reading, we were able  to isolate the initial influence of nominal-patterns on lexical access. This was made possible by using a sophisticated presentation procedure  that combines the ‘fast-priming paradigm’ with the ‘letter-delay paradigm’ while monitoring readers’ eye movement. In so doing, this study demonstrated the role of the word-pattern as a mediating unit of morphological decomposition of Hebrew complex words as well as the manner in which root extraction is constrained by a mutual process of pattern extraction. It is suggested that the nominal-pattern units should be incorporated together with the root units into the morphological stratum of any model of lexical representation and lexical access of complex words in Semitic language.

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