Structure, form, and meaning in the mental lexicon: evidence from Arabic

Abstract

Does the organization of the mental lexicon reflect the combination of abstract underlying morphemic units or the concatenation of word-level phonological units? We address these fundamental issues in Arabic, a Semitic language where every surface form is potentially analyzable into abstract morphemic units – the word pattern and the root – and where this view contrasts with stem-based approaches, chiefly driven by linguistic considerations, in which neither roots nor word patterns play independent roles in word formation and lexical representation. Five cross-modal priming experiments examine the processing of morphologically complex forms in the three major subdivisions of the Arabic lexicon – deverbal cognitive entities, operating independently of semantic factors and dissociable from possible phonological confounds, while stem-based approaches consistently fail to accommodate the basic psycholinguistic properties of the Arabic mental lexicon