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Part of ESRC Funded grant project running March 1st 2021-Sept. 30 2024. PI: Linnaea Stockall, QMUL. Language Project Leader: Samantha Wray The experiment pre registered here is part of the project SAVANT (Systematicity and Variation In Word Structure Processing Across Languages: A Neuro-Typology Approach). Building on previous work on Greek and English, the project aims to investigate lexical access in morphologically complex words in a wider range of under-investigated languages, including Indo-European languages like Bangla and Slovenian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS), and languages from outside the Indo-European family like Arabic and Tagalog. The same experiment is used to present words which break either a grammatical category rule (eg. ‘re-idea’ in which the verbal prefix ‘ re-‘ is attached to a noun) or a compositional semantic rule (eg.’re-smile’ – ‘re-‘ requires that the verbal stem it attaches to be able to take a result-state-denoting internal argument, so attaching it to an unergative verb violates that rule), together with grammatical, existing words formed from the same affix (eg. reappear), and see whether the behavioral and neural responses observed in previous research with English and Greek are universal. The current experiment is a lexical decision task in Modern Standard Arabic. We employ a paradigm where category and semantic violations relate to root and pattern interleaving. The quadriliteral pattern taC1aC2C3aC4 (where C=root consonant) tends to have reflexive, passive, or resultative meaning. We have interleaved this pattern with attested roots to form unattested nonce words, some of which result in category violations, in which the root itself is only or primarily attested in nominal words, and semantic violations, in which the root is attested in verbs, but is semantically unsuited to a reflexive, passive, or resultative. |
