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The Separability of Morphological Processes from Semantic Meaning and Syntactic Class in Production of Single Words: Evidence from the Hebrew Root Morpheme

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Abstract

In the present study we investigated to what extent the morphological facilitation effect induced by the derivational root morpheme in Hebrew is independent of semantic meaning and grammatical information of the part of speech involved. Using the picture–word interference paradigm with auditorily presented distractors, Experiment 1 compared the facilitation effect induced by semantically transparent versus semantically opaque morphologically related distractor words (i.e., a shared root) on the production latency of bare nouns. The results revealed almost the same amount of facilitation for both relatedness conditions. These findings accord with the results of the few studies that have addressed this issue in production in Indo-European languages, as well as previous studies in written word perception in Hebrew. Experiment 2 compared the root’s facilitation effect, induced by morphologically related nominal versus verbal distractors, on the production latency of bare nouns. The results revealed a facilitation effect of similar size induced by the shared root, regardless of the distractor’s part of speech. It is suggested that the principle that governs lexical organization at the level of morphology, at least for Hebrew roots, is form-driven and independent of semantic meaning. This principle of organization crosses the linguistic domains of production and written word perception, as well as grammatical organization according to part of speech.

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Notes

  1. There are some nouns in Hebrew that are not structured according to this typical Semitic structure as they have a non-Semitic origin.

  2. Although some Hebrew words are formed by the addition of derivational suffixes and prefixes, this is not very common. Affixation can be applied both to complex basic Semitic structures as well as to words from non-Semitic origin.

  3. In fact there are a few word-patterns that can represent more than one part of speech. This occurs in the case of participle forms, which can function grammatically as a nominal or a verbal form.

  4. An alternative approach (Costa et al. 2005; Janssen et al. 2008; Mahon et al. 2007) rejects lexical competition models. This approach is discussed in “General Discussion”.

  5. This generalization should be probably restricted to specific conditions of these experiments, which include constrains on the parameters of the SOA and type of semantic relations between the distractor and the target, i.e., pair of words which are members of the same semantic category and on the same hierarchical level (e.g., Abdel Rahman and Melinger 2009 for a review).

  6. The phonetic transliteration of these words is [ktiva], [katav], [katava] or [mixtav] as [v] and [b], as well as [x] and [k] are allophones in a conditioned variation of /b/ and /k/ respectively.

  7. Participles in Hebrew have nominal as well as verbal morphological characteristics (see above footnote #3). Many of them also function as adjectives. Adjectival forms (which are not participles in Hebrew) are regarded as a sub-type of the nominal system. There are a few nominal patterns that may include forms that can denote adjectives as well as nouns. In many cases the distinction between nouns and adjectives in Hebrew is not clear, and the same form can function syntactically either as attributive adjectives or as nominal subjects.

  8. In fact there were a few deviations: 5 distractors in the M+S+ condition shared 4 rather than 3 letters with the picture, and one such case also appeared in the M+S\(-\) condition.

  9. We recorded all the distractors for Exp. 1A to avoid differences in recording quality between the distractors of the new phonological control condition and the other distractor conditions that were recoded for Exp. 1.The recordings in all the experiments were made by the same woman.

  10. With the exception of 3 distractor words in the noun morphologically related condition that shared 4 rather than 3 consonants with the target words.

  11. The means refer to 34 items, as two items were omitted from the analyses; see the “Results” section.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a grant from the Israeli Science Foundation (#179/09) to Avital Deutsch. I thank Roni Pener-Tessler, Tamar Malinovitch, Dana Zahar and Yaara Lador for their extensive help in constructing the materials and excellent assistance in running the experiments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The School of Education, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 91905, Jerusalem, Israel

    Avital Deutsch

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  1. Avital Deutsch
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Correspondence to Avital Deutsch.

Appendices

Appendix 1

Phonetic transcription and English translation of picture names and distractor names in all conditions, and phonemic transcription of the root shared by the picture name and the morphologically related distractors In Experiment 1 and 1A. In parentheses are the mean ratings of semantic relatedness between the picture name and each of morphologically related conditions, as well as between the picture name and the unrelated distractor.

figure a

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Appendix 2

Phonetic transcription and English translation of picture names and distractor names in all conditions, and phonemic transcription of the root shared by the picture name and the morphologically related distractors in Experiment 2.

figure c

figure d

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Deutsch, A. The Separability of Morphological Processes from Semantic Meaning and Syntactic Class in Production of Single Words: Evidence from the Hebrew Root Morpheme. J Psycholinguist Res 45, 1–28 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-014-9317-3

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