The processing of root morphemes in Hebrew: Contrasting localist and distributed accounts

Abstract

The present paper investigates whether Semitic languages impose a rigid tri-consonantal structural principle on root-morpheme representation, by examining morphological priming effects obtained with primes consisting of weak roots. For weak roots, the complete three-consonantal structure is not kept in most of their derivations, and only two letters are consistently repeated in all derivations. In a series of masked priming experiments subjects were presented with primes consisting of the weak roots letters which are repeated in all derivations. The results showed that the two consistent letters of weak roots facilitated the recognition of targets derived from these roots. In contrast, any two letters of complete roots did not facilitate the recognition of complete root derivations. The implications of these results to Parallel-Distributed models and to localist-representational approaches, are discussed.

Acknowledgments

This study was supported in part by the Binational Science Foundation Grant 00-00056, and in part by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Grant HD 01994 to Haskins Laboratories.

Notes

¹For example, assimilation of the radical /n/ occurs in the following conjugations in Modern Hebrew: hif'il, huf'al, nif'al (in the past and present tense), and pa'al/kal (only in the future tense).

²Although for some mute roots there are arguments regarding whether the quiescent letter is a “y” or a “w”.

³We have no explanation for the effect obtained for nonwords, since the printing obtained under masked presentation is considered a lexical effect. We can only report that such effects have sometimes been found and reported in our laboratory (e.g., Frost et al., 2000, Expt 3).

⁴One third of the primes were the first and second letters of the root, a third were the first and last letters of the root, and a third were the second and third phoneme of the root.