TY  - JOUR
A1  - Farhy, Yael
A1  - Veríssimo, Joao Marques
A1  - Clahsen, Harald
T1  - Universal and particular in morphological processing
BT  - evidence from Hebrew
JF  - The quarterly journal of experimental psychology
N2  - Do properties of individual languages shape the mechanisms by which they are processed? By virtue of their non-concatenative morphological structure, the recognition of complex words in Semitic languages has been argued to rely strongly on morphological information and on decomposition into root and pattern constituents. Here, we report results from a masked priming experiment in Hebrew in which we contrasted verb forms belonging to two morphological classes, Paal and Piel, which display similar properties, but crucially differ on whether they are extended to novel verbs. Verbs from the open-class Piel elicited familiar root priming effects, but verbs from the closed-class Paal did not. Our findings indicate that, similarly to other (e.g., Indo-European) languages, down-to-the-root decomposition in Hebrew does not apply to stems of non-productive verbal classes. We conclude that the Semitic word processor is less unique than previously thought: Although it operates on morphological units that are combined in a non-linear way, it engages the same universal mechanisms of storage and computation as those seen in other languages.
KW  - Language universals
KW  - morphology
KW  - priming
KW  - Semitic
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2017.1310917
SN  - 1747-0218
SN  - 1747-0226
VL  - 71
IS  - 5
SP  - 1125
EP  - 1133
PB  - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY  - Abingdon
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Farhy, Yael
A1  - Verissimo, Joao Marques
T1  - Semantic Effects in Morphological Priming: The Case of Hebrew Stems
JF  - Language and speech
N2  - To what extent is morphological representation in different languages dependent on semantic information? Unlike Indo-European languages, the Semitic mental lexicon has been argued to be purely "morphologically driven", with complex stems represented in a decomposed format (root + vowel pattern) irrespectively of their semantic properties. We have examined this claim by comparing cross-modal root-priming effects elicited by Hebrew verbs of a productive, open-ended class (Piel) and verbs of a closed-class (Paal). Morphological priming effects were obtained for both verb types, but prime-target semantic relatedness interacted with class, and only modulated responses following Paal, but not Piel primes. We explain these results by postulating different types of morpho-lexical representation for the different classes: structured stems, in the case of Piel, and whole-stems (which lack internal morphological structure), in the case of Paal. We conclude that semantic effects in morphological priming are also obtained in Semitic languages, but they are crucially dependent on type of morpho-lexical representation.
KW  - Morphology
KW  - priming
KW  - Semitic
KW  - semantic transparency
KW  - stems
Y1  - 2019
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830918811863
SN  - 0023-8309
SN  - 1756-6053
VL  - 62
IS  - 4
SP  - 737
EP  - 750
PB  - Sage Publ.
CY  - London
ER  -