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
A1  - Clahsen, Harald
T1  - Do late bilinguals access pure morphology during word recognition?
BT  - a masked-priming study on Hebrew as a second language
JF  - Bilingualism : language and cognition
N2  - This study extends research on morphological processing in late bilinguals to a rarely examined language type, Semitic, by reporting results from a masked-priming experiment with 58 non-native, advanced, second-language (L2) speakers of Hebrew in comparison with native (L1) speakers. We took advantage of a case of ‘pure morphology’ in Hebrew, the so-called binyanim, which represent (essentially arbitrary) morphological classes for verbs. Our results revealed a non-native priming pattern for the L2 group, with root-priming effects restricted to non-finite prime words irrespective of binyanim type. We conclude that root extraction in L2 Hebrew word recognition is less sensitive to both morphological and morphosyntactic cues than in the L1, in line with the Shallow-Structure Hypothesis of L2 processing.
KW  - grammatical processing
KW  - morphology
KW  - behavioural measurements
KW  - healthy normal subjects
KW  - Hebrew
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728918000032
SN  - 1366-7289
SN  - 1469-1841
VL  - 21
IS  - 5
SP  - 945
EP  - 951
PB  - Cambridge Univ. Press
CY  - New York
ER  - 
TY  - GEN
A1  - Farhy, Yael
A1  - Veríssimo, Joao Marques
A1  - Clahsen, Harald
T1  - Universal and particular in morphological processing
BT  - evidence from Hebrew
T2  - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe
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.
T3  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 468 
KW  - language universals
KW  - morphology
KW  - priming
KW  - Semitic
Y1  - 2018
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-412541
EP  - 468
ER  -