The impact of L1 lexical organisation in L2 vocabulary acquisition

This paper presents an empirical study investigating the relationship between first language(L1) lexical organisation and second language (L2) vocabulary development. Theparticipants consisted of 191 native Arabic learners of English as a foreign language (EFL)within higher secondary education in Saudi Arabia. To conduct the study, two receptivevocabulary size tests (L1 Arabic-Lex and L2 English X-Lex) were used with an L1 lexicalorganisation test (ALOT) which was designed for the purpose of the study. Learners' L1lexical organisation scores were found to be associated with their L1 and L2 receptivevocabulary scores. However, the strong correlation found between lexical organisation andthe size of the lexicon in learners’ L1 might well suggest that lexical networks and the size ofthe lexicon are one unified system. Nevertheless, to find any potential interaction between L1lexical organisation and size on L2 vocabulary acquisition, ‘moderation’ analyses wereperformed. Moderation results revealed three levels of interaction; low, average and high.The low level shows that a low level of lexical organisation leads to low levels of L1 and L2vocabulary size. The same relationship trend was logged for average and high levels. Theseresults thus emphasise the importance of a well-structured L1 mental lexicon on L2vocabulary acquisition

Matrices of the frequency and similarity of Arabic letters and allographs

Published online: 19 February 2020Indicators of letter frequency and similarity have long been available for Indo-European languages. They have not only been pivotal in controlling the design of experimental psycholinguistic studies seeking to determine the factors that underlie reading ability and literacy acquisition, but have also been useful for studies examining the more general aspects of human cognition. Despite their importance, however, such indicators are still not available for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), a language that, by virtue of its orthographic system, presents an invaluable environment for the experimental investigation of visual word processing. This paper presents for the first time the frequencies of Arabic letters and their allographs based on a 40-million-word corpus, along with their similarity/confusability indicators in three domains: (1) the visual domain, based on human ratings; (2) the auditory domain, based on an analysis of the phonetic features of letter sounds; and (3) the motoric domain, based on an analysis of the stroke features used to write letters and their allographs. Taken together, the frequency and similarity of Arabic letters and their allographs in the visual and motoric domains, as well as the similarities among the letter sounds, will be useful for researchers interested in the processes underpinning orthographic processing, visual word recognition, reading, and literacy acquisition.This research was funded by two United Arab Emirates University College of Humanities and Social Sciences grants to Sami Boudelaa (G00002367 and G00003158)

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

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 nouns, verbs, and primitive nouns. The results demonstrate that root and word pattern morphemes function as abstract 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

Morphological structure in the Arabic mental lexicon: Parallels between standard and dialectal Arabic.

The Arabic language is acquired by its native speakers both as a regional spoken Arabic dialect, acquired in early childhood as a first language, and as the more formal variety known as Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), typically acquired later in childhood. These varieties of Arabic show a range of linguistic similarities and differences. Since previous psycholinguistic research in Arabic has primarily used MSA, it remains to be established whether the same cognitive properties hold for the dialects. Here we focus on the morphological level, and ask whether roots and word patterns play similar or different roles in MSA and in the regional dialect known as Southern Tunisian Arabic (STA). In two intra-modal auditory-auditory priming experiments, we found similar results with strong priming effects for roots and patterns in both varieties. Despite differences in the timing and nature of the acquisition of MSA and STA, root and word pattern priming was clearly distinguishable from form-based and semantic-based priming in both varieties. The implication of these results for theories of Arabic diglossia and theories of morphological processing are discussed

Transposed letter priming effects and allographic variation in Arabic: Insights from lexical decision and the same-different task.

Reading is resilient to distortion of letter order within a word. This is evidenced in the "transposed-letter (TL) priming effect," the finding that a prime generated by transposing adjacent letters in a word (e.g., jugde) facilitates recognition of the base word (e.g., JUDGE), more than a "substituted-letter" control prime in which the transposed letters are replaced by unrelated letters (e.g., junpe -JUDGE). The TL priming effect is well documented for European languages that are written using the Roman alphabet. Unlike these languages, Arabic has a unique position-dependent allography whereby some letters change shape according to their position within a word. We investigate the TL priming effect using a lexical decision (Experiment 1) and a same-different match task with Arabic words (Experiment 2) and nonwords (Experiment 3). No TL priming effects were found in Experiment 1, suggesting that the lexical-decision task engages lexical access processes that are sensitive to the Semitic nonlinear morphological structure. Experiments 2 and 3 revealed a robust TL priming effect overall. Nonallographic TL primes produced significantly larger facilitation than allographic TL primes, indicating that Arabic readers use allographic variation to resolve the uncertainty in letter order during the early stages of orthographic processing. The implication of these results for current letter position coding models is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)

MULTIMAP: Multilingual picture naming test for mapping eloquent areas during awake surgeries

Published online: 8 September 2020Picture naming tasks are currently the gold standard for identifying and preserving language-related areas during awake brain surgery. With multilingual populations increasing worldwide, patients frequently need to be tested in more than one language. There is still no reliable testing instrument, as the available batteries have been developed for specific languages. Heterogeneity in the selection criteria for stimuli leads to differences, for example, in the size, color, image quality, and even names associated with pictures, making direct cross-linguistic comparisons difficult. Here we present MULTIMAP, a new multilingual picture naming test for mapping eloquent areas during awake brain surgery. Recognizing that the distinction between nouns and verbs is necessary for detailed and precise language mapping, MULTIMAP consists of a database of 218 standardized color pictures representing both objects and actions. These images have been tested for name agreement with speakers of Spanish, Basque, Catalan, Italian, French, English, German, Mandarin Chinese, and Arabic, and have been controlled for relevant linguistic features in cross-language combinations. The MULTIMAP test for objects and verbs represents an alternative to the Oral Denomination 80 (DO 80) monolingual pictorial set currently used in language mapping, providing an open-source, standardized set of up-to-date pictures, where relevant linguistic variables across several languages have been taken into account in picture creation and selection.Funded by Severo Ochoa (SEV-2015-049); the European Research Council (ERC-2011-ADG-295362), and MINECO (RTI2018- 093547-B-I00)

The form of morphemes:MEG evidence from masked priming of two Hebrew templates

Studies of lexical access have benefited from comparisons between languages like English, which shows concatenative morphology, and Semitic languages showing non-concatenative morphology of roots and patterns. Morphological decomposition in Semitic has previously been probed using masked priming, originally developed to investigate concatenative morphology. However, studies conducted on Semitic languages have often targeted Semitic-specific questions, such as whether the root and the verbal template prime lexical access. The overall consequence of these studies for our understanding of lexical access remains unclear. In two experiments on Hebrew using MEG, we demonstrate that a verbal form which is orthographically and phonologically indistinguishable from non-verbal forms is primed by other verbs in the same template but not by similar nouns and adjectives. These results suggest that masked priming taps into more than just visual forms but reflects morphological content, even if this content is abstract, showing no distinct orthographic or phonological marking

On the evaluation and improvement of arabic wordnet coverage and usability

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10579-013-9237-0[EN] Built on the basis of the methods developed for Princeton WordNet and EuroWordNet, Arabic WordNet (AWN) has been an interesting project which combines WordNet structure compliance with Arabic particularities. In this paper, some AWN shortcomings related to coverage and usability are addressed. The use of AWN in question/answering (Q/A) helped us to deeply evaluate the resource from an experience-based perspective. Accordingly, an enrichment of AWN was built by semi-automatically extending its content. Indeed, existing approaches and/or resources developed for other languages were adapted and used for AWN. The experiments conducted in Arabic Q/A have shown an improvement of both AWN coverage as well as usability. Concerning coverage, a great amount of named entities extracted from YAGO were connected with corresponding AWN synsets. Also, a significant number of new verbs and nouns (including Broken Plural forms) were added. In terms of usability, thanks to the use of AWN, the performance for the AWN-based Q/A application registered an overall improvement with respect to the following three measures: accuracy (+9.27 % improvement), mean reciprocal rank (+3.6 improvement) and number of answered questions (+12.79 % improvement).The work presented in Sect. 2.2 was done in the framework of the bilateral Spain-Morocco AECID-PCI C/026728/09 research project. The research of the two first authors is done in the framework of the PROGRAMME D'URGENCE project (grant no. 03/2010). The research of the third author is done in the framework of WIQEI IRSES project (grant no. 269180) within the FP 7 Marie Curie People, DIANA-APPLICATIONS-Finding Hidden Knowledge in Texts: Applications (TIN2012-38603-C02-01) research project and VLC/CAMPUS Microcluster on Multimodal Interaction in Intelligent Systems. We would like to thank Manuel Montes-y-Gomez (INAOE-Puebla, Mexico) and Sandra Garcia-Blasco (Bitsnbrain, Spain) for their feedback on the work presented in Sect. 2.4. We would like finally to thank Violetta Cavalli-Sforza (Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco) for having reviewed the linguistic level of the entire document.Abouenour, L.; Bouzoubaa, K.; Rosso, P. (2013). On the evaluation and improvement of arabic wordnet coverage and usability. Language Resources and Evaluation. 47(3):891-917. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-013-9237-0S891917473Abbès, R., Dichy, J., & Hassoun, M. (2004). The architecture of a standard Arabic lexical database: Some figures, ratios and categories from the DIINAR.1 source program. In Workshop on computational approaches to Arabic script-based languages, Coling 2004. Geneva, Switzerland.Abouenour, L., Bouzoubaa, K., & Rosso, P. (2009a). Structure-based evaluation of an Arabic semantic query expansion using the JIRS passage retrieval system. 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A text mining approach for definition question answering. In Proceedings of the 5th international conference on natural language processing, FinTal’2006, Turku, Finland.Diab, M. T. (2004). Feasibility of bootstrapping an Arabic Wordnet leveraging parallel corpora and an English Wordnet. In Proceedings of the Arabic language technologies and resources, NEMLAR, Cairo, Egypt.El Amine, M. A. (2009). Vers une interface pour l’enrichissement des requêtes en arabe dans un système de recherche d’information. In Proceedings of the 2nd conférence internationale sur l’informatique et ses applications (CIIA’09), May 3–4, Saida, Algeria.Elghamry, K. (2008). Using the web in building a corpus-based hypernymy-hyponymy Lexicon with hierarchical structure for Arabic. In Proceedings of the 6th international conference on informatics and systems, INFOS 2008. Cairo, Egypt.Elkateb, S., Black, W., Vossen, P., Farwell, D., Rodríguez, H., Pease, A., et al. (2006). Arabic WordNet and the challenges of Arabic. 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English Gigaword (3rd ed.). Philadelphia, USA: Linguistic Data Consortium.Hammou, B., Abu-salem, H., Lytinen, S., & Evens, M. (2002). QARAB: A question answering system to support the Arabic language. In Proceedings of the workshop on computational approaches to Semitic languages, ACL, (pp. 55–65), Philadelphia.Hearst, M. A. (1992). Automatic acquisition of hyponyms from large text corpora. In Proceedings of the 14th conference on Computational linguistics, COLING ‘92 (vol. 2, pp. 539–545).Kanaan, G., Hammouri, A., Al-Shalabi, R., & Swalha, M. (2009). A new question answering system for the Arabic language. American Journal of Applied Sciences, 6(4), 797–805.Kim, H., Chen, S., & Veale, T. (2006). Analogical reasoning with a synergy of HowNet and WordNet. In Proceedings of GWC’2006, the 3rd global WordNet conference, January, Cheju, Korea.Kipper-Schuler, K. (2006). VerbNet: A broad-coverage, comprehensive verb lexicon. Ph.D. Thesis.Mohammed, F. A., Nasser, K., & Harb, H. M. (1993). A knowledge-based Arabic question answering system (AQAS). In ACM SIGART bulletin (pp. 21–33).Niles, I., & Pease, A. (2001). Towards a standard upper ontology. In Proceedings of FOIS-2 (pp. 2–9), Ogunquit, Maine.Niles, I., & Pease, A. (2003). Linking lexicons and ontologies: Mapping WordNet to the suggested upper merged ontology. In Proceedings of the 2003 international conference on information and knowledge engineering, Las Vegas, Nevada.Ortega-Mendoza, R. M., Villaseñor-pineda, L., & Montes-y-Gõmez, M. (2007). Using lexical patterns to extract hyponyms from the Web. In Proceedings of the Mexican international conference on artificial intelligence MICAI 2007. November, Aguascalientes, Mexico. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 4827. Berlin: Springer.Palmer, M., P. Kingsbury, & D. Gildea. (2005). The proposition bank: An annotated corpus of semantic roles. Computational Linguistics, 21. USA: MIT Press.Pantel, P., & Pennacchiotti, M. (2006). Espresso: Leveraging generic patterns for automatically harvesting semantic relations. In Proceedings of conference on computational linguistics association for computational linguistics, (pp. 113–120), Sydney, Australia.Rodriguez, H., Farwell, D., Farreres, J., Bertran, M., Alkhalifa, M., & Martí, A. (2008a). Arabic WordNet: Semi-automatic extensions using Bayesian Inference. In Proceedings of the the 6th conference on language resources and evaluation LREC2008, May, Marrakech, Morocco.Rodriguez, H., Farwell, D., Farreres, J., Bertran, M., Alkhalifa, M., Mart., M., et al. (2008b). Arabic WordNet: Current state and future extensions. In Proceedings of the fourth global WordNet conference, January 22–25, Szeged, Hungary.Sharaf, A. M. (2009). The Qur’an annotation for text mining. First year transfer report. School of Computing, Leeds University. December.Snow, R., Jurafsky, D., & Andrew, Y. N. (2005). Learning syntactic patterns for automatic hypernym discovery. In Lawrence K. Saul et al. (Eds.), Advances in neural information processing systems, 17. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Suchanek, F. M., Kasneci, G., & Weikum, G. (2007). YAGO: A core of semantic knowledge unifying WordNet and Wikipedia. In Proceedings of 16th international World Wide Web conference WWW’2007, (pp. 697–706), May, Banff, Alberta, Canada: ACM Press.Tjong Kim Sang, E., & Hofmann, K. (2007). Automatic extraction of Dutch hypernym–hyponym pairs. In Proceedings of CLIN-2006, Leuven, Belgium.Toral, A., Munoz, R., & Monachini, M. (2008). Named entity WordNet. In Proceedings of the Sixth international conference on language resources and evaluation (LREC’08), Marrakech, Morocco.Vossen, P. (Ed.). (1998). EuroWordNet, a multilingual database with lexical semantic networks. The Netherlands: Kluwer.Wagner, A. (2005). Learning thematic role relations for lexical semantic nets. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Tübingen, 2005

Evaluating Effects of Divided Hemispheric Processing on Word Recognition in Foveal and Extrafoveal Displays: The Evidence from Arabic

Background: Previous studies have claimed that a precise split at the vertical midline of each fovea causes all words to the left and right of fixation to project to the opposite, contralateral hemisphere, and this division in hemispheric processing has considerable consequences for foveal word recognition. However, research in this area is dominated by the use of stimuli from Latinate languages, which may induce specific effects on performance. Consequently, we report two experiments using stimuli from a fundamentally different, non-Latinate language (Arabic) that offers an alternative way of revealing effects of split-foveal processing, if they exist. Methods and Findings: Words (and pseudowords) were presented to the left or right of fixation, either close to fixation and entirely within foveal vision, or further from fixation and entirely within extrafoveal vision. Fixation location and stimulus presentations were carefully controlled using an eye-tracker linked to a fixation-contingent display. To assess word recognition, Experiment 1 used the Reicher-Wheeler task and Experiment 2 used the lexical decision task. Results: Performance in both experiments indicated a functional division in hemispheric processing for words in extrafoveal locations (in recognition accuracy in Experiment 1 and in reaction times and error rates in Experiment 2) but no such division for words in foveal locations. Conclusions: These findings from a non-Latinate language provide new evidence that although a functional division i

Beyond decomposition: processing zero-derivations in English visual word recognition

Four experiments investigate the effects of covert morphological complexity during visual word recognition. Zero-derivations occur in English in which a change of word class occurs without any change in surface form (e.g., a boat-to boat; to soak-a soak). Boat is object-derived and is a basic noun (N), whereas soak is action-derived and is a basic verb (V). As the suffix {-ing} is only attached to verbs, deriving boating from its base, requires two steps, boat(N)>boat(V)>boating(V), while soaking can be derived in one step from soak(V). Experiments 1 to 3 used masked priming at different prime durations to test matched sets of one and two-step verbs for morphological (soaking-SOAK) and semantic priming (jolting-SOAK). Experiment 4 employed a delayed-priming paradigm in which the full verb forms (soaking and boating) were primed by noun and verb phrases (a soak/to soak, a boat/to boat). In both paradigms, different morphological priming patterns were observed for one-step and two-step verbs, demonstrating that morphological processing cannot be reduced to surface form-based segmentation