{"pk":49618,"title":"Exploring the Role of Productivity in Arabic Word Recognition: Insights from a Masked Priming Experiment ","subtitle":null,"abstract":"<p>Semitic languages are characterized as having two types of discontinuous morphemes: roots and word patterns. The role of these morphemes in lexical access and representation remains debated, especially in the case of word patterns. Roots exhibit robust priming for both nouns and verbs, while word patterns yield mixed results—verbal patterns tend to show stronger priming effects than nominal ones. While previous research (e.g., Deutsch et al., 1998) suggested that differences in productivity might explain these word class effects on word pattern priming, no study has directly investigated this hypothesis. To isolate the contributions of productivity and word class, we used a 2×2 factorial design crossing productivity (high vs. low) with word class (verb vs. noun). This design allows us to disentangle the two variables that were previously confounded in studies such as Boudelaa &amp; Marslen-Wilson (2015). We did this using a masked visual priming experiment in Arabic. We found that, regardless of word class, high- productivity patterns showed robust priming, whereas low- productivity patterns did not. Additionally, priming from high- productivity patterns was distinct from semantic and orthographic effects, confirming the independent role of word patterns in morphological decomposition. These results support the dual-route model of lexical access (Baayen et al., 1997).</p>","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Linguistics; Neuroscience; Psychology; Decision making; Language Comprehension; Language understanding; Morphology; Speech recognition; Quantitative Behavior; Statistics"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8qq2n6sd","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Abeer","middle_name":"Ali","last_name":"Abbas","name_suffix":"","institution":"Jazan University","department":""},{"first_name":"Lily","middle_name":"","last_name":"Xu","name_suffix":"","institution":"UCLA","department":""},{"first_name":"Megha","middle_name":"","last_name":"Sundara","name_suffix":"","institution":"UCLA","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T10:00:00-08:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49618/galley/37580/download/"}]}