The role of morphological structure during word reading in Arabic-English bilinguals: effects of bilingual profile

When bilinguals process words in one of their languages, the words in their other language are also activated. This activation can be due to shared conceptual representations or to direct cross- linguistic links between the words at the lexical level. The nature of the activation is affected by the bilingual profile of the speaker, with more proficient L2 speakers activating conceptual representations directly while less proficient speakers arc more dependent on lexical level links. The aim of my research is to investigate the role of bilingual profile in the lexical organization of Arabic-English bilinguals. Bilingual profile refers to relative status of the two languages, which can depend on a number of factors for example, language dominance, age of acquisition and proficiency. In this thesis I test the lexical processing of Arabic-English bilinguals in masked and visible priming of lexical decision to written words. Arabic and English have different scripts and also differ in their morphological structure making them ideal languages for testing lexical level cross-linguistic activation. I examine the effect bilingual profile on the effect of morphological and semantically related Arabic primes and targets and the effect of Arabic morphological and translation primes on the processing of English targets