The Neural Encoding of Arabic Root Patterns : A Behavioral Pilot Study

Abstract

Words in Semitic languages, like Arabic and Hebrew, are created by combining roots and word patterns. In some cases, a word may be composed of a root that repeats a consonant. This consonant repetition is a part of a process called reduplication. Reduplication results in Semitic languages having a morphological root structure, in which some words have a root that repeats the second consonant. The behavioral pilot study I am doing is interested in this reduplication pattern, and if Arabic speakers generalize the root patterns onto words they know, and ones they do not. In a study done by Berent (2002), she had found Hebrew speakers rejected nonwords with unattested repetition patterns, or nonwords with roots that repeated the first consonant, at a faster rate than they rejected nonwords with an attested repetition pattern, or nonwords that had roots that repeated the second consonant. After replicating her experiment with Arabic speakers in a pilot study, we plan to test Arabic speakers in a scanner to assess the representation of reduplication patterns in the brain. Through neural decoding and effective connectivity analyses of brain imaging data, we hope to determine if reduplication is a rule-driven process (grammar) or an associative process involved in mapping speech to stored wordform representations.