Albert Gatt, University of Malta: Snagged by the root in the cosnonant jungle

A robust finding in research on word recognition during reading is that words (such as judge) whose letters have been transposed to form non-words (such as jugde) can be recognised easily. This result has been observed not only for English, but also for other languages, such as Spanish, Thai and Korean.

Semitic languages such as Hebrew and Arabic appear to be somewhat different. Experimental work using the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation paradigm (RSVP; Velan and Frost, 2007), in which sentences are presented word by word very rapidly, suggests that readers in these languages are far less accurate than, say, their English counterparts in recognising words whose root consonants have been transposed. One interpretation of these results is that for readers of these languages, the consonantal root has a special status which is not present in other languages. One possible reason for this difference lies in their orthographic system, which tends to privilege consonants and frequently omits vowels. Another important factor is the centrality of the root in the morphology of these languages.

Maltese presents a particularly interesting test case because although it is a Semitic language, it uses the Roman alphabet, putting it on a par with languages such as English and Spanish where orthography is concerned.

In this talk, I describe an experiment which replicates the methodology of Velan and Frost (2007) on Maltese readers. It compares the recognition accuracy of Maltese words whose root consonants have been transposed, to that of English words with transposed consonants. Our results suggest that Maltese evinces characteristics that are completely unlike those usually reported for Semitic languages. Indeed, Maltese readers’ accuracy in recognising words with consonant transpositions is on a par with their accuracy in recognising English words under similar conditions.

I will attempt to interpret these results in the light of two important characteristics of Maltese: (a) its orthographic system, which is distinct from that of other Semitic languages; (b) its hybrid morphology, in which root-based morphological processes co-exist with stem-based processes. I will argue that, orthography aside, a crucial reason for the difference between Maltese on the one hand and Arabic and Hebrew on the other, is the relatively unproductive nature of its Semitic morphological component. The talk concludes with some remarks on the implications of these findings for models of word recognition and morphological processing. 

Læs mere om Albert Gatt: http://staff.um.edu.mt/albert.gatt/