Boudelaa Sami, Perea Manuel, Carreiras Manuel
Department of Cognitive Sciences, UAEU, Al Ain, UAE.
Universitat de València, Valencia, Spain.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2025 Apr;32(2):770-778. doi: 10.3758/s13423-024-02563-8. Epub 2024 Sep 20.
Two views contend to account for the processes at play during the early stages of visual word recognition. The first holds that these stages are not modulated by the idiosyncratic properties of different languages. The second maintains that the structural properties of the language determine the weighting of the different domains of linguistic knowledge (e.g., orthographic and morphological domains may be differentially weighted across languages). To explore this question, we focused on orthographic priming in Arabic. In this Semitic language, lexical representations are claimed to be based on morphological similarity, with little or no role for orthographic similarity. We conducted two masked priming experiments using the yes-no and go/no-go versions of the lexical decision task to determine if Arabic target words (e.g., مدير 'mudyr', director) are facilitated by nonword primes that are orthographically but not morphologically related (i.e., pairs share neither a root nor a word pattern; e.g.,ماير 'maAyr') relative to unrelated primes. Results showed faster responses for the orthographically related target words than for the unrelated target words in the two experiments. These findings favor the view that the early phases of visual word processing in Semitic and Indo-European languages are fundamentally the same.
关于视觉单词识别早期阶段所涉及的过程，有两种观点相互争论。第一种观点认为，这些阶段不受不同语言特质属性的调节。第二种观点则坚持认为，语言的结构属性决定了语言知识不同领域的权重（例如，正字法和形态学领域在不同语言中的权重可能有所不同）。为了探究这个问题，我们聚焦于阿拉伯语中的正字法启动效应。在这种闪米特语中，词汇表征据称基于形态相似性，正字法相似性几乎没有作用或不起作用。我们使用词汇判断任务的是/否和走/不走版本进行了两项掩蔽启动实验，以确定阿拉伯语目标词（例如，“مدير”（mudyr，意为“director”））相对于无关启动词，是否会受到在正字法上相关但在形态学上无关的非词启动词（即，两者既不共享词根也不共享词型；例如，“ماير”（maAyr））的促进。结果表明，在这两项实验中，与正字法相关的目标词的反应速度比无关目标词更快。这些发现支持了这样一种观点，即闪米特语和印欧语系语言中视觉单词处理的早期阶段在根本上是相同的。
