Three eye-tracking experiments were conducted to explore the effects of phonological, semantic and root activation in spoken word recognition (SWR) in Saudi Arabian Arabic. Arabic roots involve both phonological and semantic information, therefore, a series of three studies were conducted to isolate the effect of the root independently from phonological and semantic effects. Each experiment consisted of a series of trials. On each trial, participants were presented with a display with four images: a target, a competitor, and two unrelated images. Participants were asked to click on the target image. Participants' proportional fixations to the four areas of interest and their reaction times (RT) were automatically recorded and analyzed. The assumption is that eye movements to the different types of images and RTs reflect degrees of lexical activation. Experiment 1 served as a foundation study to explore the nature of phonological, semantic and root activation. Experiment 2A and 2B aimed to explore the effect of the Arabic root as a function of semantic transparency and phonological onset similarity. Growth Curve Analyses (Mirman, 2014, GCA;) were used to analyze differences in target and competitor fixations across conditions. Results of these experiments highlight the importance of phonological, semantic and root effects in SWR in Arabic. Fixations to competitors were graded and corresponded to the different amounts of phonological, semantic and morphological overlap between targets and competitors. The results of this work highlight the importance of the Arabic consonantal root as an independent processing unit in lexical access in SWR in Arabic that is separable from phonological and semantic units of processing. Finally, the results of this work provided support to models of SWR that feature both whole-word processing as well as morphological decomposition (e.g. Baayen, Dijkstra, & Schreuder, 1997; Giraudo & Grainger, 2000; Schreuder & Baayen, 1997). They also provide support to the morpheme-based theory of Arabic morphology (McCarthy, 1979, 1981).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/36053 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Alamri, Abdurrahman |
| Contributors | Zamuner, Tania |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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