This dissertation investigates the cognitive relevance of Arabic morphology and diglossia in spoken word recognition. The current study asks four main questions: (1) Does Arabic morphology influence word recognition? (2) Which view of Arabic morphology (i.e., the root-based or the stem-based) has an online role in spoken word recognition? (3) Does Arabic diglossia (i.e., using colloquial Arabic (CA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) as the dominant language of speaking and literacy, respectively) affect spoken word processing? (4) How can Arabic diglossia affect spoken word recognition? Three different lexical decision experiments and one phoneme-monitoring task were designed and conducted on a group of 140 literate native speakers of Jordanian colloquial Arabic (JCA). In the first experiment, the participant responded to MSA words varied in their surface, root, and stem frequencies. Results revealed that the token frequencies of the three tested units affected the speed of word recognition to the same extent. This suggests that both roots and stems, along with the surface words, are valid units of Arabic mental lexicon. The next two experiments compared the processing of JCA and MSA words when embedded in sentences of the same or the other variety of Arabic and when primed by intra-variety vs. cross-variety words. Results showed a lexical switching cost only when the target word is processed in the sentential context. Moreover, while the sentence experiment reported a processing advantage for MSA words relative to JCA words, the priming experiment found a processing advantage for JCA words. The priming effects were larger when the related primes were presented in JCA relative to the priming effects of the MSA primes. The fourth experiment compared phoneme monitoring of consonants and short vowels in JCA and MSA words. Results showed a detection advantage for consonants relative to short vowels and no difference between the carrier words of the two varieties of Arabic. On the whole, the last three experiments suggest that both spoken language (i.e., CA) experience and literary language (i.e., MSA) experience can affect auditory word recognition. This work emphasizes the relevance of (alphabetic) literacy and experimental task in speech processing. / February 2017

<p>This dissertation sheds light on the semantic domain of causation in Arabic. The aim is to examine two Arabic causative verb forms, Form I and Form II, and their associations with (in)directness of causation. The central working hypothesis throughout this work is the verb-semantics hypothesis by Shibatani and Pardeshi (2002), which posits that autonomy of the causee, degree of directed causation, requirement for an external causer, and merger of two subevents into one conceptual event are factors that predict the morpho-syntactic complexity of a causative construction. Following the lead of Ambridge et al. (2020) on their operationalization of the verb-semantics hypothesis by Shibatani and Pardeshi (2002), two experiments were conducted. In both experiments, 60 animations for 60 verbs were used to depict various causative scenarios. The first experiment explored how Arabic speakers mentally perceived 60 events that depicted various degrees of causativity. This was achieved through collecting ratings from 20 Arabic speakers on four semantic variables: autonomy of the causee, degree of directed causation, degree of event-merge, and the requirement for an external causer. The second experiment obtained judgments of the relative acceptability of the less- and more-transparent causative forms of the same 60 verbs from 24 native-speaking Arabic adults. </p> <p>Three analyses were conducted on the results to better understand how causatives manifest in language use cross-linguistically, with a dedicated focus on the Arabic language.The first analysis addressed whether the four semantic variables of the verb-semantics hypothesis of Shibatani and Pardeshi (2002) account for the restrictions on the use of Arabic verb Form I and Form II. It was found that the variables autonomy of the causee, degree of directed causation, and the requirement for an external causer each showed strong positive correlations with Form I. The variable degree of event-merge showed a weak positive correlation with Form I. No correlations were noticed between any of the four variables and Form II. The second analysis addressed whether Arabic speakers perceive events in a similar way to speakers of other languages. Because this study followed the methodology Ambridge et al. (2020) used to examine causatives in English, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese and Kʼicheʼs, the results could be directly compared. It was discovered that yes, Arabic speakers conceptualize the events tested similarly to speakers of the five other comparison languages. Twenty-three verbs (>38.3%) were rated the same by all speakers (120 speakers, 20 from each language) on all four semantic variables. From the remaining thirty-seven verbs, twenty-three verbs received the same ratings in three of the semantic variables, but not in event-merge. The remaining fourteen verbs were associated with numerous disagreements among the participants. The third and final analysis addressed the claim that all human languages use morphosyntax to mark the difference between direct versus indirect causative events by testing whether this holds true for Arabic. Across-linguistic computational model developed by Aryawibawa et al. (2021) was used to answer this question on the reasoning that if the principle is truly cross-linguistic, then the universal model should be able to utilize speaker semantic judgements to make accurate predictions about the grammatical acceptability of the different morphosyntactic forms. The model accurately predicted Arabic speaker judgments by a moderate correlation of 0.05, suggesting that Arabic conceptualizes directness of causation in a similar way to other languages, which supports the view that the underlying semantic distinction of more versus less direct causation maps onto and manifests as a morphosyntactic distinction. </p>