Ram Frost

Shlomo Bentin

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Discussion
Linguistic theory and psychological reality: a
reply to Boudelaa & Marslen-Wilson
Shlomo Bentin*, Ram Frost
Department of Psychology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem 91905, Israel
In a very interesting paper, Boudelaa and Marslen-Wilson (in press) revive a 19th
century theory of Semitic language morphology suggesting that the major morpho-
logical unit that conveys the core meaning of words (mainly verbs) in Semitic
languages is a bi-consonantal structure labeled ªetymonº (Gesenius, 1817, edited
and enlarged by Kautzsch).1 From a historical perspective, this idea has been raised
several times during the last century, eliciting wide discussions and disagreement
among linguists (see Kurylowicz, 1973). The strongest argument in favor of the
existence of such a morphemic unit came from the analysis of bi-consonantal
ancient nouns in Arabic and Hebrew (NoÈldeke, 1910; for more recent references
see Bohas, 1977; Bohas & Darfouf, 1993; McCarthy, 1979).
The concept of the etymon as the cornerstone of Semitic morphology is in sharp
contrast to the well-accepted view that considers the three-consonantal root to be the
kernel and major carrier of meaning in Hebrew and Arabic words. Although linguis-
tically plausible, the etymon theory has never gained wide support, and probably
cannot be unequivocally proven through linguistic investigation. Arguments against
the etymon as a theoretical construct usually rely on the verbal system of Semitic
languages, demonstrating that without exception, verbs which were derived from
ancient two-consonantal nouns have always expended to include another consonant
to create the classic three-consonantal structure (e.g. Blau, 1971). More importantly,
the major weakness of the etymon as a theoretical construct is the lack of constrained
rules for determining which two consonants of a given word form the etymon (Y.
Blau, pers. commun.).
Boudelaa and Marslen-Wilson (B&MW) were not concerned with the linguistic
status of the etymon theory, but focused on the psychological reality of the etymon.
S. Bentin, R. Frost / Cognition 81 (2001) 113±118 113
Cognition 81 (2001) 113±118
www.elsevier.com/locate/cognit
0010-0277/01/$ - see front matter q 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
PII: S0010-0277(01)00120-2
COGN I T I O N
* Corresponding author. Fax: 1972-2-5825659.
E-mail address: msbentin@mscc.huji.ac.il (S. Bentin).
1 The ®rst to draw attention to this fact was the XIIIth century Arab philologist Al-BaidaÄnõÈ (Fleisch,
1961).
They report a set of experiments exploring cross-modality and masked priming
effects between words sharing the etymon, with or without a semantic relation
between primes and targets. The effect of sharing the etymon on lexical decision
performance was assessed in comparison with pairs of words in which the targets
and the primes had a similar surface (phonological) structure, or were completely
unrelated. The results revealed that lexical decisions were considerably faster (60±
70 ms in cross-modal priming and 20±30 ms in masked priming) if the targets and
the primes shared a common etymon than if they had different etymons. Semantic
overlap did not interact with morphological priming in any of the tasks. Prima facie,
these results strongly support the psychological validity of the etymon in word
recognition. Indeed, on the basis of this outcome, B&MW embraced an approach
to the morphological structure of Semitic languages in which the etymon (and not
the root) is the primary organizing unit in the lexicon. By their account, the third
letter of the traditional root is added in order to provide the skeletal morpheme
imposed by the surface structure of the absolute majority of words in Semitic
languages. In contrast, the etymon is a higher abstract morphological unit, part of
the lexical entry of the word.
The results of this study are seemingly compelling. However, we would like to
raise some theoretical caveats about the B&MW interpretation. Although the histor-
ical perspective regarding the rise and fall of the etymon as a linguistic construct is
interesting, this aspect of the etymon controversy is beyond the scope of our reply
(for a critical review, see however Kurylowicz, 1973). In the present reply, like
B&MW, we will limit ourselves to the issue of its psychological reality. We begin
by outlining the complications that the concept of the etymon poses for any model of
morphological representation. Then we raise some queries about the results obtained
by B&MW and end by suggesting a possible alternative interpretation of their
®ndings.
The idea that two letters are the kernel morpheme carrying the core meaning of
the words in Semitic languages is dif®cult to maintain because of several reasons.
First, there are no a priori and clearly de®ned rules for morphological decomposition
that would result in the unequivocal stripping or isolation of the etymon letters or
phonemes. In contrast to the root, which is conspicuous in the word's structure and is
derived by considering the nominal or verbal patterns of words (Feldman, Frost, &
Pnini, 1995; Frost, Deutsch, & Forster, 2000), ®nding the etymon of a word seems to
be a very dif®cult task. Morphological decomposition into etymons is especially
complicated because, in contrast to the root, there are no constraints on the order by
which the two letters of the etymon should appear within the word. Indeed, there are
many examples in the stimuli provided by B&MW in which the two letters of the
etymon appear in one order in the prime and in another order in the target. Appar-
ently, one could make the claim that ªbº and ªlº are the etymon of [mubtallun] and
[waabilun] but not of [baliidun] because the ®rst two are semantically related. But as
B&MW admit, a semantic relationship is not a necessary condition for determining
the etymon. Since processes of morphological decomposition are determined by the
interrelation of form transparency and distributional properties (e.g. Laudanna &
Burani, 1995; Schreuder & Baayen, 1995), a theory of decomposition into etymons
S. Bentin, R. Frost / Cognition 81 (2001) 113±118114
does not seem very compelling. Whether Arabic speakers are sensitive to the etymon
and can extract it from printed words is, however, an empirical question. We
addressed this question through a short paper-and-pencil experiment.
Because the concept of etymon is not taught in schools (at least not in the Arab
schooling system in Israel), we did not expect our participants to have a priori
knowledge of the etymon and be able to overtly identify it without explicit instruc-
tion. We assumed, however, that if the etymon is a psychologically real morpheme,
native Arabic speakers should be able to identify it once it is de®ned. To test this
assumption, we selected at random 20 prime±target pairs from those used by
B&MW in their study. These pairs were presented in random order in a list of 40
words to 20 Arab speakers, students at the Hebrew University who were instructed
as following: ªYou will be presented with a list of words. In each word, some letters
have a greater importance in conveying the origin or the meaning of the word. For
each of the 40 words in the list, please mark the two most important letters that
convey its meaning or origin in the best way.º Obviously, as speakers of a Semitic
language, we expected the participants to focus on the letters of the root. We were
intrigued, however, whether they would be accurate in identifying the two letters of
the etymon among the three letters of root.
For each participant we calculated accuracy separately among the words used by
B&MW as primes, and among the words used by B&MW as targets. More impor-
tantly, we counted the number of pairs in which the participants accurately identi®ed
the etymon in both the prime and its matched target. Note that the extraction of the
same etymon in the prime and in the target is the basis for expecting etymon-based
priming effects. The results showed that, on the average, our students correctly
identi®ed the etymon of only 27.2 words (68%) out of the 40 words in the list,
equally distributed among the primes and among the targets. This level of accuracy
is lower than one would expect if the etymon would be a psychologically real
morpheme, particularly noticing that there are only three possible two-letter combi-
nations in a given three-letter root. The weakness of this performance is even more
conspicuous considering that native speakers of Semitic languages can easily report
without error what letters of the word belong to the root, even at the ®rst grades of
primary school. Even more problematic was the fact that in only 50% of the pairs
(10.1 out of 20) was the same etymon correctly identi®ed for both the prime and the
target. This outcome is particularly disturbing because any claims regarding priming
effects rely on the implicit assumption that the same etymon is perceived for the
prime and the target. Our present test revealed that this assumption might be incor-
rect.
Although, in general, native speakers acquire meta-awareness of morphemic
units, which may account for morphological priming, the results above suggest
that explicit knowledge of Arabic speakers about etymons could not have accounted
for the large priming effects observed by B&MW. The alternative explanation is that
these effects re¯ected knowledge accumulated implicitly by exposure to the statis-
tical regularity that exists between orthographic and phonological sublexical units
and semantic features (see, for example, Plaut & Shallice, 1993; Seidenberg, 1987;
Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989; Van Orden, Pennington, & Stone, 1990).
S. Bentin, R. Frost / Cognition 81 (2001) 113±118 115
However, an account based on implicit learning is also dif®cult to maintain. As we
mentioned above, in the absence of a priori rules for morphological decomposition,
without minimal constraints on the order of the letters, and with only weak, or no
correlations between letters and semantic meaning, it is almost impossible to build
up statistical regularities that are the basis for implicit learning.
In addition to the theoretical and empirical complications that emerge assuming
that etymons are primary morphemic units in Arabic, we were also puzzled by some
aspects of the data reported by B&MW. The ®rst puzzle concerns the almost iden-
tical priming effect in the [1Etym 1Sem] condition and the [1Etym 2Sem] condi-
tion in the cross-modality paradigm. Even assuming that the morphological priming
effect is independent of semantics (and perhaps particularly assuming indepen-
dence) larger priming effects should have been found in the [1Sem] condition
than in the [2Sem] condition. Indeed, Frost, Deutsch, Gilboa, Tannenbaum, and
Marslen-Wilson (in press) have shown that morphological priming effects in
Hebrew increase with semantic similarity in the cross-modal paradigm. Similarly,
in the study of Bentin and Feldman (1990), morphological and semantic priming
effects (within modality) were found to be additive. As both of these studies exam-
ined Hebrew, a Semitic language, they provide an unexplained contrast with the
®ndings of B&MW. The second puzzle concerns the size of the morphological
masked priming effects, which is unusually large. In the last few years Frost and
his colleagues have reported results from an extensive series of masked priming
experiments in Hebrew, which focused on the effect of shared morphemic units
between targets and primes on word recognition (Deutsch, Frost, & Forster, 1998;
Frost et al., 2000, in press; Frost, Forster, & Deutsch, 1997). A meta-analysis of their
results across studies revealed a surprisingly stable size of the root priming effect,
which is about 13 ms (^2 ms). Indeed, the facilitation induced by the shared two
letters of the etymon was sometimes larger than the effects reported by Frost and his
colleagues in the full identity priming conditions. Considering that the root is a much
more conspicuous morphological unit than the etymon, the much larger effects
reported by B&MW for the etymon are hard to account for. Furthermore, the two
etymon letters do not necessarily appear in the same order within the prime and the
target, and masked priming is sensitive only to form and not to semantic overlap.
What alternative factors might account for the priming effects in the [1Etym]
conditions reported by B&MW? One factor to be considered is the baseline from
which the priming effects were computed, that is, the ªunrelatedº condition.
Although B&MW went a long way towards controlling for form overlap, some
discrepancies in the phonological similarity between primes and targets in the
[1Etym] and [2Etym] conditions may still remain. B&MW argue perhaps convin-
cingly why form overlap could not be calculated linearly given the non-concatena-
tive morphology of Arabic. Nevertheless, at least in some of their stimuli the primes
in the [1Etym] conditions were systematically more similar in form to the targets
than the primes in the [2Etym] conditions. Taking the ®rst stimulus of the appendix
as an example, FAASILUN seems to be more phonologically similar to MUNTA-
SAFUN than NADIMUN is to MUNTASAFUN. This discrepancy in similarity is
particularly salient if we focus on the root letters. Whereas the prime in the [1Etym]
S. Bentin, R. Frost / Cognition 81 (2001) 113±118116
condition shares two root letters with the target, the prime in the [2Etym] condition
shares only one. We admit that we cannot unequivocally determine whether some
hidden phonological factors indeed affected the results reported by B&MW, and we
may be proven wrong. However, because the theory offered by B&MW has such far-
reaching implications, we believe that additional experiments and conducted repli-
cations are required before it is unquestionably embraced.
Acknowledgements
We express our deepest appreciation for the help received from Professor Yeho-
sua Blau in understanding the origin of the etymon in Semitic languages, and
referring us to the relevant linguistic arguments. This work has been supported by
an NICHD #01994 to Haskins Laboratories.
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Linguistic theory and psychological reality: A reply to Boudelaa &amp; MarslenWilson

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