Supplemental material, appendices for Morphological structure mediates the notional meaning of ge... more Supplemental material, appendices for Morphological structure mediates the notional meaning of gender marking: Evidence from the gender-congruency effect in Hebrew speech production by Avital Deutsch and Maya Dank in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
The present study addressed the issue of the independence of syntactic processing from lexical an... more The present study addressed the issue of the independence of syntactic processing from lexical and semantic processing. Syntactic (inflectional) priming was manipulated by preceding verb, adjective, and pseudoword targets with noun phrases that either agreed or disagreed in gender and/or number with the target. In Experiment 1, similar syntactic priming effects were found whether the target was a word or a pseudoword. For both, subjects' decisions that targets were the same/different to a probe were faster for targets that were syntactically congruent with their sentential context than for incongruent targets. In Experiment 2, there was a congruency effect for gender: Naming a target that did not agree in gender with the preceding noun phrase was delaYE!d relative to naming a congruent target, but only if the noun phrase's subject was animate. For inanimate targets, syntactic congruency had no statistically significant effect. We suggest that inflectional analysis may not re...
The present study investigated the process of accessing gender information when producing inanima... more The present study investigated the process of accessing gender information when producing inanimate nouns in Hebrew. The Picture Word Interference paradigm was used to manipulate gender congruency between target pictures and spoken distractors. Naming latency and accuracy were measured. The gender congruency effect has been tested in various Indo-European languages, with mixed results. It seems to depend on both language-specific attributes and the syntactic context of the utterance. Speakers’ insensitivity to gender congruency was observed at 3 SOAs (Experiment 1a–1c). Neither the production of bare nouns (Experiments 1 & 3) nor gender-marked NPs (Experiment 2) elicited the effect. Nevertheless, the same procedure and targets revealed a semantic effect. The present findings in Hebrew deviate from previous results obtained with Indo-European languages. The results are discussed in connection with Hebrew’s nonconcatenative morphological features and the way linguistic characteristics...
Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance, 2022
This study explored the role of consonants and vowels in auditory word perception in Hebrew, usin... more This study explored the role of consonants and vowels in auditory word perception in Hebrew, using an auditory-auditory priming procedure. A common finding is the greater importance for consonants than vowels in spoken word processing, henceforth the C-bias. What underlies the C-bias is a controversial issue between the "acquired functional hypothesis" and the "initial-bias hypothesis." The former predicts a different pattern of asymmetry among languages, while the latter claims that the C-bias exists in all languages. Hebrew is interesting because it allows the exploration of whether language-specific morphological properties can modulate consonant/vowel asymmetry. This opportunity stems from its unique complex Semitic morphological structure that was found to have a central role in lexical access. To evaluate the consonant/vowel asymmetry in Hebrew in relation to previously studied languages, recognition of morphologically complex Hebrew words was compared with...
Abstract In Hebrew, as in other Semitic languages, most words are formed in a non-concatenated wa... more Abstract In Hebrew, as in other Semitic languages, most words are formed in a non-concatenated way, with a root morpheme embedded in a word-pattern morpheme consisting of only vowels or vowels plus consonants. Previous research on visual word recognition in Hebrew has revealed a robust morphological root-priming effect, with word recognition facilitated by the prior sub-perceptual presentation of the root morpheme, along with a less stable and more fragile word-pattern priming effect, particularly in the nominal system. These findings support the theory that morphological principles govern lexical access, with the root morpheme as a main organizational unit of the mental lexicon. However, less research has been done to delineate the algorithm underlying decomposition. The current study explores the importance of the natural lexical orthographic context of a complex root + pattern word structure for root extraction, using on-line measures based on tracking eye-movements in sentence reading. A series of 4 experiments using a fast-priming paradigm demonstrated that detaching the root morpheme from its lexical orthographic structure hinders the root-priming effect. Presenting the root in a non-word or a pseudo-word, that is, a non-existent combination of a real root + a real pattern did not make any difference. These results suggest that mapping the orthographic root onto its morphological mental representation depends on the orthographic context in which its letters appear. This finding constrains the role of the root in visual word-recognition, highlighting the crucial conditions for extracting it in the natural setting of reading.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2020
Hebrew noun–noun compounds offer a valuable opportunity to study the long-standing question of ho... more Hebrew noun–noun compounds offer a valuable opportunity to study the long-standing question of how morphologically complex words are processed during reading. Specifically, in some morpho-syntactic environments, the first (head) noun of a compound carries a suffix—a clear orthographic marker of being part of a compound—whereas in others it is homographic with a stand-alone noun. In addition to this morphological cue, Hebrew occasionally employs hyphenation as a visual signal that two nouns, which are typically separated by a space, are combined in a compound. In a factorial design, we orthogonally manipulated the morphological and the visual cues and recorded eye movements of 75 proficient Hebrew readers while they read sentences with embedded compounds. The effect of hyphenation on reading times was inhibitory. This slow-down was significantly weaker in compounds where the syntactic relation between constituents was overtly marked by a suffix compared with compounds without a morph...
Supplemental material, appendices for Morphological structure mediates the notional meaning of ge... more Supplemental material, appendices for Morphological structure mediates the notional meaning of gender marking: Evidence from the gender-congruency effect in Hebrew speech production by Avital Deutsch and Maya Dank in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
The present study addressed the issue of the independence of syntactic processing from lexical an... more The present study addressed the issue of the independence of syntactic processing from lexical and semantic processing. Syntactic (inflectional) priming was manipulated by preceding verb, adjective, and pseudoword targets with noun phrases that either agreed or disagreed in gender and/or number with the target. In Experiment 1, similar syntactic priming effects were found whether the target was a word or a pseudoword. For both, subjects' decisions that targets were the same/different to a probe were faster for targets that were syntactically congruent with their sentential context than for incongruent targets. In Experiment 2, there was a congruency effect for gender: Naming a target that did not agree in gender with the preceding noun phrase was delaYE!d relative to naming a congruent target, but only if the noun phrase's subject was animate. For inanimate targets, syntactic congruency had no statistically significant effect. We suggest that inflectional analysis may not re...
The present study investigated the process of accessing gender information when producing inanima... more The present study investigated the process of accessing gender information when producing inanimate nouns in Hebrew. The Picture Word Interference paradigm was used to manipulate gender congruency between target pictures and spoken distractors. Naming latency and accuracy were measured. The gender congruency effect has been tested in various Indo-European languages, with mixed results. It seems to depend on both language-specific attributes and the syntactic context of the utterance. Speakers’ insensitivity to gender congruency was observed at 3 SOAs (Experiment 1a–1c). Neither the production of bare nouns (Experiments 1 & 3) nor gender-marked NPs (Experiment 2) elicited the effect. Nevertheless, the same procedure and targets revealed a semantic effect. The present findings in Hebrew deviate from previous results obtained with Indo-European languages. The results are discussed in connection with Hebrew’s nonconcatenative morphological features and the way linguistic characteristics...
Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance, 2022
This study explored the role of consonants and vowels in auditory word perception in Hebrew, usin... more This study explored the role of consonants and vowels in auditory word perception in Hebrew, using an auditory-auditory priming procedure. A common finding is the greater importance for consonants than vowels in spoken word processing, henceforth the C-bias. What underlies the C-bias is a controversial issue between the "acquired functional hypothesis" and the "initial-bias hypothesis." The former predicts a different pattern of asymmetry among languages, while the latter claims that the C-bias exists in all languages. Hebrew is interesting because it allows the exploration of whether language-specific morphological properties can modulate consonant/vowel asymmetry. This opportunity stems from its unique complex Semitic morphological structure that was found to have a central role in lexical access. To evaluate the consonant/vowel asymmetry in Hebrew in relation to previously studied languages, recognition of morphologically complex Hebrew words was compared with...
Abstract In Hebrew, as in other Semitic languages, most words are formed in a non-concatenated wa... more Abstract In Hebrew, as in other Semitic languages, most words are formed in a non-concatenated way, with a root morpheme embedded in a word-pattern morpheme consisting of only vowels or vowels plus consonants. Previous research on visual word recognition in Hebrew has revealed a robust morphological root-priming effect, with word recognition facilitated by the prior sub-perceptual presentation of the root morpheme, along with a less stable and more fragile word-pattern priming effect, particularly in the nominal system. These findings support the theory that morphological principles govern lexical access, with the root morpheme as a main organizational unit of the mental lexicon. However, less research has been done to delineate the algorithm underlying decomposition. The current study explores the importance of the natural lexical orthographic context of a complex root + pattern word structure for root extraction, using on-line measures based on tracking eye-movements in sentence reading. A series of 4 experiments using a fast-priming paradigm demonstrated that detaching the root morpheme from its lexical orthographic structure hinders the root-priming effect. Presenting the root in a non-word or a pseudo-word, that is, a non-existent combination of a real root + a real pattern did not make any difference. These results suggest that mapping the orthographic root onto its morphological mental representation depends on the orthographic context in which its letters appear. This finding constrains the role of the root in visual word-recognition, highlighting the crucial conditions for extracting it in the natural setting of reading.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2020
Hebrew noun–noun compounds offer a valuable opportunity to study the long-standing question of ho... more Hebrew noun–noun compounds offer a valuable opportunity to study the long-standing question of how morphologically complex words are processed during reading. Specifically, in some morpho-syntactic environments, the first (head) noun of a compound carries a suffix—a clear orthographic marker of being part of a compound—whereas in others it is homographic with a stand-alone noun. In addition to this morphological cue, Hebrew occasionally employs hyphenation as a visual signal that two nouns, which are typically separated by a space, are combined in a compound. In a factorial design, we orthogonally manipulated the morphological and the visual cues and recorded eye movements of 75 proficient Hebrew readers while they read sentences with embedded compounds. The effect of hyphenation on reading times was inhibitory. This slow-down was significantly weaker in compounds where the syntactic relation between constituents was overtly marked by a suffix compared with compounds without a morph...
Uploads